Peter Hujar’s place in American photography was summed up aptly, and not a little harshly, deep within the biography of another photographer. Hujar’s career, Patricia Morrisroe wrote in Mapplethorpe, was “a shadow version” of her subject’s. “The two men might be compared,” she goes on, “to … Mozart and Salieri.”
Liveright; 100 pp., $265.00
So let’s compare. Both men were contemporaries in the two very small worlds of fine art photography and 1970s and ‘80s Lower East Side Manhattan, where their friends and their subjects overlapped. Indeed, their styles of black-and-white documentary portraiture could easily be confused, though neither liked the other’s work. Both were gay men who died of AIDS complications mere years apart — Hujar in 1987 at 53, Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989 at 42. Yet Hujar dwelled in Mapplethorpe’s shadow with what has been politely described as “secret fame.” Hujar’s ability to alienate art dealers and gallerists was almost directly proportional to Mapplethorpe’s talent for attracting them. Hujar all but quit after his AIDS diagnosis while the always prolific Mapplethorpe went into production overdrive.
The circumstantial comparisons have predominated in a dual misfortune of more distinctive contemporaries crowding him out (add Nan Goldin, Joel-Peter Witkin, and maybe Bruce Weber) and the simple scarcity of his work. This corrective was slow to come, as if his legendary abrasiveness lingered after death. His greatest recent exposure was through Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, using Hujar’s Orgasmic Man (1969) for its cover image. This was followed three years later by an exhibit in the Morgan Library, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. Now Liveright has done the service of bringing out a new, more luxe edition of Portraits in Life and Death, Hujar’s only book in his lifetime and long out of print since its original 1976 publication. This invites more than artistic comparison but allows us to consider Hujar in total, on his own terms.
Originally brought out in paperback with a print run in the hundreds and opened with a brief, elliptical introduction Susan Sontag wrote from her hospital bed, Portraits, in the words of Benjamin Moser’s new foreword, acquired a “legendary status” in its time. Today it is “a symbol of a lost world: a world before AIDS; of a bohemian downtown New York whose lofts were filled with artists.” This is a peculiar pitch when you pursue the actual makeup of the book, which follows the title with the utmost literalness. The 40 total photographs are divided between 29 portraits of living subjects taken throughout the 1970s with 11 still-life photos of catacombs in Palmero, Italy, taken in 1963. The book even admits that there is “no necessary connection to the photographs themselves” outside of elegantly recalling the cycle we all follow. Yet something of the surrounding time and place cannot be entirely untethered from its contents.
Hindsight gives us an overcelebratory picture of a late-1970s New York City awash in boundless hedonism, gaudy style, and sprinkled with a tolerably glamorous crimewave. Yet in real time, it was, at best, a moment of solemn reflection. Amid the Lindsay-era hangover and the Son of Sam killings, New York arts woke up from a raucous party into a grimier aesthetic and a more insular mindset. Andy Warhol had retreated into gloomy abstraction, ceding his influence to John Waters. In turn, Candy Darling gave way to Divine and Cookie Mueller, The Velvet Underground to The New York Dolls and Suicide, and pop art to punk rock and no wave. To this, Hujar seemed no less attuned from his East Village loft. “The key word for the portraits,” he later said of the book, “is isolation. The aloneness is what’s frightening, that aloneness even looking at buildings.”
Hujar envisioned Portraits as being like a visual novel. The story, such as it is, is one of repose and shadows, as much emotionally as aesthetically. The life portraits are an assemblage of America’s cultural margins of that time, in the true sense of the word. Though subjects like William S. Burroughs, Susan Sontag, John Ashbury, John Waters, Divine, and Fran Lebowitz have acquired iconic status over the years, they easily blend with the surrounding crop of drag performers, actors, artists, writers, scenesters, and sex workers. They all coexist in a morning-after grayscale.
All play against type. Choreographer Kenneth King is stiff and slyly asymmetrical with his combover and half-ruffled beard. Composer Robert Wilson sits against a grimy wall in muted contemplation. Painter Ray Johnson is just as vacantly pensive. Of the writers, John Ashbury is at a loss for words, Fran Lebowitz is low-energy, William Burroughs looks bored, and Edwin Denby seems to have nodded off; only Susan Sontag approaches blissful contentedness. Most noteworthy is Divine in a rare state of authenticity, lounging in something like a jumpsuit, his wigless head exposing a baldpate, his face partly made up, possibly whiskered, and conveying almost a relief at his own imperfection. Hujar’s self-portrait is harder to read, perhaps intently so. Even the more joyous self-portrait included in the foreword has a severity in the brow. It is one of honed alertness typical of his art and a restlessness typical of his Horatio Alger-gone-wrong life arc. Both are in stark contrast to what may be his most famous depiction, taken at his death by his all-purpose partner David Wojnarowicz.
Hujar’s own death photos are more illusive in meaning and less arresting in feeling. Visual narrative shifts more to tone in the final 11 portraits of decayed remains. As they predate the living portraits by a whole decade, they seem to play with composition and light rather than illumine a concise theme. They are more subdued and mediative than the staged grandiosity of Joel-Peter Witkin’s mangled corpses, yet they are less precise than Diane Arbus’s aestheticized attack-mode street portraiture. There is enough artistry to forestall the touristic, even as one moves through these final pages in more or less the same manner.
A better connective theme is suggested by Moser in his foreword: “Some of Hujar’s most disquieting pictures show Manhattan’s skyscrapers as tombstones. In his images of the World Trade Center, the passage of time has once again added to his foreboding.” If only that had been included, giving a more complete conception of Hujar as an urban chronicler in a mournful age. Unlike his famous contemporaries, he may be more remote from our own cultural aspirations. He lacks the cool polish of Mapplethorpe but retains a humanity his contemporary took pains to neutralize. He has all the candor of Nan Goldin but prefers solemnity to irreverence, an eternal maturity instead of an eternal youth. And for all its lack of shock, it still shows us what we’d rather not see: that the moment is more truthful and less pleasing than its memory.
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Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @cr_morgan.
