‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde
‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”
This week, the picture of a 24year-old Lebowitz smoking a cigarette, slightly slumped, in a white shirt and tight white trousers on the arm of a settee, goes on show at the Venice biennale, alongside the 40 other pictures from Portraits in Life and Death. Twenty-nine of them depict artists, writers and performers Hujar knew and admired from the downtown scene of 1970s New York – many of them reclining in a state of reverie that seems completely un-posed. There’s the writer Susan Sontag, supine on a bed with a pensive expression; the drag artist and underground film star Divine off duty and resting on some cushions; nightclub dancer TC, topless and drowsily seductive; poet and dance critic Edwin Denby with his eyes meditatively closed, his wrinkles mirroring the rumpled duvet behind him.
The book then cuts to a memento mori: a dozen startling shots of 17thcentury skeletons in their graves, taken in 20 minutes when Hujar visited the catacombs in Palermo, Italy, in 1963. They seem to suggest that everyone pictured in the book is dying, the photographer and the viewer, too. In fact, Hujar died of Aids in 1987, aged 53.
As Sontag says in her foreword, written in hospital while she was being treated for breast cancer: “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably.”
Published in 1976, Portraits in Life and Death got just four reviews, the most-high profile being in the Village Voice. It failed to sell many copies. Today, however, it is recognised as not only a priceless document of a vanished culture, but as a collection of some of the finest portraits ever taken. Hujar insisted on printing all his pictures himself, and his meticulous efforts in his darkroom on Second Avenue resulted in black-andwhite images that marry psychological acuity with flawless technique. “There’s a richness about the shades of grey he coaxes out of each print,” says Grace Deveney, curator of the Venice show. “And the longer you look, the more you see.”
“He made me conscious of the importance of the photograph as an object – a print to be held, examined and appreciated,” notes Vince Aletti, photography critic of the New Yorker, and another of Hujar’s close friends. “A photograph is not just a picture on a piece of paper. It has variations of size, weight, tone, texture and clarity that can vary from print to print. I never thought much about these things before I knew Hujar. Now I can’t forget them.”
Hujar’s reputation has risen in the past couple of decades. Many people first encountered his work on the cover of I Am a Bird Now by Anthony and the Johnsons, a stunning shot of the trans Warhol superstar Candy Darling in a hospital bed as she was dying of lymphoma aged 29. Another classic Hujar image, a man’s face at the point of orgasm, is on the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s misery lit blockbuster A Little Life. Yet despite his work’s undeniable quality, Hujar never attained the success of his peer and rival Robert Mapplethorpe, not least because he had a habit of infuriating anyone who could have helped him.
“He was sitting on a lot of rage,” says writer Stephen Koch, who was executor of his estate. As Lebowitz recalls: “I used to admonish him, ‘If someone is going to give you a show in Paris, don’t hit them over the head with a bar stool.’” Lebowitz is referring to an actual