Peter Hujar, Eyes Open in the Dark8 Images
The Warhol superstar Candy Darling in hospital, on her deathbed. The writer and public intellectual Susan Sontag in profile, staring up at the ceiling. David Brintenzhofe, a drag performer, captured before he steps on stage, still applying his makeup. These are some of the most striking, iconic photographs taken by Peter Hujar. Relying on stark, deceptively simple aesthetics – photos taken in black and white, an absence of props or elaborate settings – Hujar’s body of work is a record of the queer community that he was surrounded by throughout his life, from artists and intellectuals to the young men lying on the Christopher Street Pier.
Hujar captured outsiders and underground communities in the United States and Europe, and was constantly in the orbit of contemporaries like Paul Thek, John Waters and, perhaps most importantly, the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. Hujar only published a single book of his work in his lifetime, the now classic (but at the time disregarded) Portraits in Life and Death. His own life was cut short, as it was for so many of his friends and contemporaries, by Aids.
As the career-spanning retrospective Eyes Open in the Dark opens at Raven Row in London, we present a dA-Zed guide to the life and work of Peter Hujar, whose photographs remain as aesthetically power and politically urgent now as they were decades ago.
Tragically, it’s impossible to talk about Hujar’s life and work without considering the Aids crisis which ravaged the queer community in the 1970s and 80s. While John Douglas Millar – the co-curator of the Raven Row retrospective, and Hujar’s biographer – acknowledges that “it’s difficult to say in any straightforward way how the Aids crisis influenced Hujar’s work formally,” as time goes on it feels impossible to avoid acknowledging the ways in which it creeps in on the edge of the frame.
Hujar is now most widely known for his black-and-white photographs. Combined with the simplicity with which he framed and captured his images, Hujar’s monochromatic palette allows us to consider his subjects in strikingly simple terms, far removed from artifice or spectacle.
While Hujar only saw a small amount of public attention given to his work while he was alive, in the wake of his passing, his reputation – and the ways in which his work is used – has only grown. His image of Candy Darling on her deathbed was used as the cover for Anohni and the Johnsons’ album I Am a Bird Now, and his 1969 photo “Orgasmic Man” adorns the cover of the BookTok sensation A Little Life.
Among the many fascinations that seemed to drive Hujar’s career, drag was chief among them, as he trained his camera onto underground theatres and performers. These portraits are at their most striking when Hujar snaps a subject in the moments between reality and performance. His David Brintzenhofe series captures the titular subject while being made up for performance, as one way of being slowly gives way to another.
In 1973, Hujar moved into a loft above the Eden Theatre in the East Village, a place where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. This living/working space seemed to capture a microcosm not just of Hujar, but of the world and time in which he lived. Gary Schneider, an artist, master printer, and co-curator of Eyes Open in the Dark, remembers it vividly: “The climb to his floor was long and steep. You entered a short hallway and on the right-hand wall hung a large Paul Thek fragmented, gridded portrait of Peter, made in 1963 during their romantic relationship, and it is presented in Eyes Open in the Dark. [The loft] was very sparsely furnished. He used the area with the large lunette window, above the theatre awning on Second Avenue, as his open portrait studio.”
There’s a strange sensation that comes with looking at Hujar’s portraits now, decades after he first took them. It feels as if one is flicking through the pages of a countercultural yearbook, able to see what everyone from Fran Lebowitz to Divine were like in their more formative years. While less explicitly interested in capturing celebrity as someone like Warhol, many of Hujar’s portraits capture figures just on the cusp of fame when Hujar took their pictures.
In the wake of the Stonewall riots in June 1969, Hujar was on the scene with his then-lover Jim Fouratt who began organising for the Gay Liberation Front. To commemorate the first anniversary of Stonewall, the GLF planned the first Pride March in New York City, using a photograph taken by Hujar to promote the event: members of the GLF, with their arms linked and fists in the air, look back at the lens with joy.
Hujar’s work has a complicated relationship to history. Schneider reflects, “Peter did not think of himself as a queer artist. He often said he just wanted to be remembered as an artist […] He didn’t think that he was photographing queer life.” As Schneider says, Hujar wasn’t a documentary photographer or an artist with an explicitly activistic practice, but rather “that the work has become part of queer history seems like a natural result of the time he was photographing, and the intimacy and honesty of his photographic gaze”.
While Hujar might be most frequently associated with New York, the Village, and the countercultural spaces that adorned the city, some of his most compelling work was produced while he was in Italy. In 1958 he accompanied the artist Joseph Raffael to Italy and returned there with Paul Thek five years later. His images of the catacombs in Palermo are among some of his most striking and were later featured in Portraits in Life and Death.
There’s an air of intimacy in Hujar’s photographs; the unguarded way he captures his subjects, something that Schneider says could lead to “an erotic exchange”. In “Jay and Fernando [Two men in Leather Kissing]” (1966), Hujar’s ability to capture intimate life is showcased in this tender moment that captures eroticism with a rare frankness.
Stephen Koch – a lifelong friend of Hujar’s – became the administrator of the artist’s estate after he passed away. Now, Koch administers the estate as the Peter Hujar Archive, which serves as a repository for Hujar’s photographs, and any writing and events surrounding his life and work.
What do Susan Sontag, John Waters and David Wojnarowicz have in common? Not only were their photographs all taken by Hujar, but each of them adopted a similar position: lying down. Millar acknowledges that this inevitably became perceived as a representation of death, but, more than that, he sees it as indicative of what Hujar wanted from his subjects: “Vulnerability, or honesty and acceptance in front of the camera. He wants the sitter to be able to come to him without their day-to-day defences in place.”
There’s an unavoidable comparison to be made between Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. Both photographers favoured black-and-white imagery, though Mapplethorpe perhaps offered explicit eroticism as opposed to Hujar’s unguarded intimacy. While the two ran in the same circles for a time, Hujar would dismiss Mapplethorpe’s work by saying, “Well, it looks like art”.
Hujar’s life and work are inextricable with the New York of the 1960s through to the 80s. From his home and studio on Second Avenue to the images of performers like Charles Ludlam – a key figure in the Theatre of the Ridiculous, who was also lost to Aids in 1987 – and even the city itself. Hujar’s “New York: Sixth Avenue” (1976) makes the city and its skylines seem eternal, even as the world that Hujar captured no longer exists.
As well as photographing countercultural figures, Hujar was an outsider himself. During his lifetime, he didn’t enjoy the mainstream success that some of his contemporaries – and indeed, several of his subjects – did, something exacerbated by the artist’s habit of self-sabotage, according to his friends and confidants.
If there were a single word that might act as a shorthand for Hujar’s work, it could be portraits. While this doesn’t capture the entirety of his body of work – some of his most striking images are of landscapes, ruined buildings and catacombs – it does speak to what makes his work singular: the simplicity and intimacy that he was able to capture.
While Hujar might not have seen himself as an explicitly queer artist, it’s impossible to ignore the large role that queer life and culture played in his work. Be it his pictures of cruising spots and piers or his portraits of artists and performers, Hujar almost inadvertently provided a record of a queer world lost to time and tragedy.
“Hujar claimed on occasion it was his crotch that appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers designed by Warhol,” recalls Millar. Although Hujar had been aware of Warhol’s presence in the art world since the late 1950s, the two didn’t officially meet until the mid-1960s, when Hujar returned from Italy and was introduced to Warhol by the art historian Allen Rosenbaum. Hujar sat for four of Warhol’s Screen Tests, all of which appear as part of Eyes Open in the Dark.
Peter Hujar and Paul Thek first began dating in 1959. A few years later, the two went to Italy together when Hujar acquired a Fulbright. Each of the two men took photos and made art of one another – Thek’s gridded image of Hujar adorned the latter’s apartment.
Hujar spent his childhood living on a farm with his Ukranian grandparents, only speaking Ukranian until the age of 12. In 2024, the Ukrainian Museum showed a retrospective of Hujar’s work, placing his life and practice in the context of an immigrant family, and Ukrainian culture in particular.
Hujar’s legacy is that of a chronicler of New York’s art world; even Hujar’s apartment, where he lived and worked, had him enmeshed in the underground of the East Village, capturing a small world in a moment of transit, between the explosion of the Stonewall Riots and the worst years of the Aids crisis.
Perhaps the most important relationship of Hujar’s life was the one that he had with the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. While the two were only lovers for a brief period, they remained close from when they met in 1981, until Hujar’s death in 1987. As well as taking many photographs of the younger artist, Hujar had an almost nurturing relationship with him. Schneider recalls visiting Hujar’s apartment with his partner, John Erdman, where they were greeted by “a perfectly drawn Keith Haring ‘Radiant Baby’ on the heavy commercial door to his loft. We went in and asked Peter when Keith visited. Peter replied, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, David did it. I’m convinced he should become a visual artist. Then he will make money – I don’t want him to be poor like me.’”
For all of the differences between Hujar’s work and that of Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most fascinating might be Hujar’s desire to show something more explicit than his controversial contemporary. While Mapplethorpe never showed his subjects at the moment of orgasm, Hujar was more than willing to do so with photos like “Orgasmic Man”.
Among the photos that Hujar took during his time in Italy, some of the most compelling are those of young men on the beach, or sunbathing on the rocks. Like his images from Christopher Street Pier, Hujar shows a delicate way of capturing the beauty and transience of youth.
Hujar’s landscapes feel like they have a different energy to his portrait work. While his portraiture is intimate, sometimes erotic, there’s a meditative, zen-like quality to his photos of the Hudson River, or the World Trade Centre. For Millar, Hujar’s eye for landscapes “share [his] belief in an essential animism in all things and his desire to record and celebrate that without flinching from the real difficulty and loneliness of being in this world.” Hujar’s landscapes will be seen in a new context in the Raven Row retrospective, with the images installed as grids; Schneider says that this provides “a contrast of subject so that each image is equal to all the others”.
Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark is running at Raven Row, London, from 30 January to April 6, 2025.
