Peter Hujar: Photography Between Stonewall and AIDS

Above: Christopher Street Pier (2), 1976, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.84. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

The Christopher Street Pier, on the Hudson River at West 10th Street, was known familiarly in the 1970s as “the sex pier.” A place to see others displayed and to display oneself, it was also a site where a photographer could work openly. The pier is an idyll in Hujar’s photographs. Despite its extralegal, outsider status, it exists under broad sunlight, seamlessly a part of city life. During a heat wave on Easter weekend in 1976, Hujar photographed a man framed by his crossed legs on the pier’s wooden ledge. The place and the mood are instantly recognizable in the image, which later appeared on the cover of an issue of The Village Voice celebrating gay life on the 10th anniversary of Stonewall.

The life and art of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) were rooted in downtown New York. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance. His mature career paralleled the public unfolding of gay life between the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

After graduating from high school in 1953, Hujar worked as an assistant to commercial photographers until 1968. Five years of contributing features to mass-market magazines convinced him that a fashion career “wasn’t right for me,” and in 1973 he opted for an autonomous, near-penniless life as an artist.

In his loft  studio above a theater in the East Village, Hujar focused on those who obeyed their creative instincts and shunned mainstream success. At age 42, he published his only monograph, Portraits in Life and Death, and opened his  first solo gallery show. The searching intimacy he achieved as a portraitist carried over into unsentimental photographs of animals and plants, landscapes, buildings, and the unique features of nude bodies.

Hujar’s brief affair in 1981 with the young artist David Wojnarowicz evolved into a mentoring bond that changed both their lives. On their excursions to blighted areas around New York, Hujar created the portrait of a city in free fall, complementing Wojnarowicz’s dark vision of Reagan-era America. Peter Hujar died of AIDS-related pneumonia in November 1987.

"Peter Hujar: Speed of Life"
Through May 20
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave., at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405 (212) 685-0008
 

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1973, gelatin silver print, collection of Ronay and Richard Menschel. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In September 1973, transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling (born James Lawrence Slattery) was hospitalized for lymphoma. She asked Hujar to make a portrait of her “as a farewell to my fans.” Out of several dozen exposures, Hujar chose to print a languorous pose in which Candy’s banal, fluorescent-lit hospital room looks as elegant as the studio props in a Hollywood starlet’s portrait. Hujar later wrote that his style cues came from Candy, who was “playing every death scene from every movie.” The image became the most widely reproduced of Hujar’s works during his lifetime.

Gay Liberation Front Poster Image, 1969, gelatin silver print, purchased on e Charina Endowment Fund, e Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.76. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In the mid-1960s, as several of Hujar’s artist friends found success, he remained at the periphery of the art world. He lacked an outlet for his work but photographed crowds at events such as parades and antiwar rallies. In 1969, when he was working for fashion and music magazines, he at last put his art to explicit political use. In late June, a police raid inspired fierce resistance from the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, in the West Village. Hujar’s boyfriend at the time, Jim Fouratt, arrived on the scene to organize for the Gay Liberation Front, the first political group to cite homosexuality in its name. Hujar agreed to make a photograph for a GLF poster. The poster, portraying a jubilant group of GLF members under the slogan COME OUT!!, appeared in late spring 1970 in advance of the gay liberation march that marked the first anniversary of Stonewall.

Gary Schneider in Contortion (2), 1979, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.79. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Portraiture of bodies is another preoccupation in Hujar’s last decade of work. Bodies, he proposed, might be read as freely as faces for character, emotion, or life story. He photographed bodies in the extremes of youth and old age, bodies displaying unique features, and bodies in transient states, notably pregnancy and arousal. A pair of photographs depicts photographer Gary Schneider in contorted positions. Hujar declined to direct him in any explicit way. After a long period of false starts, Schneider says, “my defenses were dropped and I became comfortable, and then there was a very strong communication between us.” An interest in the interiority of his subject is characteristic of Hujar’s work.

Ethyl Eichelberger as Minnie the Maid, 1981, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.41. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

The subjects of his art, Hujar wrote, were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.” He lavished a portraitist’s attention on subjects who defied it in some way, such as drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger. The most photographed person in his body of work, Ethyl remains an insistently “double” subject, in whom neither actor nor role predominates. From 1978 to 1984, Hujar photographed Ethyl for flyers advertising the stage personae Nefertiti, Auntie Bellum, Medusa, Jocasta, Carlotta Empress of Mexico, Hamlette, and a dozen more.

Susan Sontag, 1975, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108.8.2310. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Hujar met Susan Sontag through their mutual friend, artist Paul Thek, in Sicily in 1963. Sontag later contributed the introduction to Hujar’s 1976 monograph Portraits in Life and Death. It included his iconic reclining portrait of the writer. At the time, The New York Review of Books had begun publishing the six essays that would be collected in her book On Photography (1977).

Self-Portrait Jumping (1), 1974, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.37. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Gary Indiana Veiled, 1981, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.35. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Sheryl Sutton, 1977, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.46. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

On his contact sheets, he often marked images in which a linear element guides the eye from the top left to the bottom right of the frame, as seen in his study of dancer Sheryl Sutton (1977). The motif, for which he offered no interpretation, is suggestive but ambiguous; it could be a diagram of decline, a gesture of self-cancellation, or perhaps something else entirely.

Horse in West Virginia Mountains, 1969, gelatin silver print, collection of Ronay and Richard Menschel. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Boy on Raft, 1978, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.97. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Daisy Aldan, June 19, 1955, gelatin silver print, the Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Stephen Koch; 2016.58. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

His earliest known exhibition print portrays his former high school English teacher (Daisy Aldan, June 18, 1955), posing in the midtown photography studio where Hujar worked as an assistant after graduating from high school in 1953. The portrait, reflecting the lively and gentle humor they shared, foreshadows the simplicity Hujar would cultivate in his portraiture. Daisy Aldan (1918–2001) was the first adult to encourage him to pursue photography and art. A former child radio actor and a lesbian who was a translator, poet, and editor, in 1953 she founded the small literary magazine Folder, which published a roster of rising New York talent, including John Ashbery, one of Hujar’s future subjects. 

Dog, Westtown, New York, 1978, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.98. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Greer Lankton, 1983, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.18. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Public Garden, Taormina, Sicily, 1959, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.49. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Steel Ruins (13), 1978, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.67. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Hudson River, 1975, gelatin silver print, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, the Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:1.54. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.