Peter Hujar: Love & Lust
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Jan. 4–March 8, 2014
Exhibit Catalogue
Fraenkel Gallery. 82 pages
with 36 tritone illustrations, $45.
PETER HUJAR (1934–1987) began as commercial photographer’s assistant, then shifted to the world of fashion before turning exclusively to fine art photography. This trajectory is identical to that of his mentor, Lisette Model, who also taught many other fashion-to-fine art photographers, notably Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn.
Throughout his career, Hujar photographed only in black-and-white, making formal, fixed, and harmonious compositions of human subjects who were often cultural or subcultural icons. His famous subjects include William S. Burroughs, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, Divine, Peggy Lee, Charles Ludlam, Jayne Mansfield, Susan Sontag, Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Robert Wilson, to name a few. However, Hujar’s œuvre was principally photographic portraits of friends and anonymous subjects that he encountered cruising through New York’s nocturnal world. Toward the end of his life at the height of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, he photographed activist, artist, and writer David Wojnarowicz, who in turn photographed Hujar on his deathbed. The theme of mortality was pervasive during the late 1980s, but there were also images that asserted individual identity while exploring same-sex sexuality and gender roles. When, in 1967, New York’s Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibit “The New Documents,” it was a turning point in contemporary photography—from populist photojournalism and social documentary transformed into an autobiographical form of documentary with visionary and personal narratives, often from a constructed landscapes. John Szarkowski, MoMA’s influential curator. used the museum’s institutional power to present this radical genre of photography that “redirected the technique and æsthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand.” The exhibit contained ninety photographs by three leading representatives of this new generation of photographers—Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. Hujar’s work is decidedly aligned with this tradition of personal and subjective documentary, with making beautiful print (versus realism), using cinematic staging, constructing events, and performing for the camera. This new breed of photographers during the 1960s weren’t received without controversy. In Diane Arbus: A Biography (2005), Patricia Bosworth describes a very agitated and anxious Arbus awaiting public reaction to her haunting, often agonizingly graphic, and transgressive vision. MoMA’s photography librarian, during the course of the exhibition, arrived early every morning before the museum opened to wipe spit from the glass of displayed portraits. Public reaction to them was quite violent. Now in the digital era, with billions of cameras and smart phones in use and with the quantity of images increasing exponentially into the trillions, one must ask: “Can a photograph still shock?” Jeffrey Fraenkel writes of Peter Hujar in the catalog preface: “Twenty-seven years after his death, the photographs on the following pages still make many viewers uneasy—quite an achievement for works of art more than a quarter century old.” Similarly, in a catalog essay “Bruce de Sainte Croix, 1976,” Stephen Koch, executor of Hujar’s estate, observes: “Decades later, this three-part masterpiece still can make many people laugh or be uncomfortable. Those reactions should not be brushed aside as mere prudery or conventionality. Hujar is often consciously courted and provoked discomfort.” (See Figure 1.) Shock is all about context. Here, without titles indicating sexual release, these direct images simply reference unguarded emotionality, whether pain or pleasure. Other images, however, are more explicit in their raw subject matter and may be visually astonishing. They might register a tremor for dividing or fetishizing individual body parts: for example, an erect penis, an armpit, a nipple, or a toe (Figure 2). There are several orgasmic images, explorations into more taboo territories, sexual landscapes with fully erect penises and orgasms shot with reduced shutter-speed to produce a silky-smooth effect of cascading semen. In “No part of me is remote, my dear,” a catalog essay, Vince Aletti writes: “Peter liked the spectacle of sex—spontaneous public performances witnessed at the piers or a subway toilet.” In another body of work in a 2005 book titled Night, co-published by the Matthew Marks and Fraenkel Galleries, Hujar captures the solitary and nocturnal world of cruising with images of New York City’s gay demimonde unsuspectingly on the verge of the AIDS epidemic. One can imagine him wandering through cobblestone streets before gentrification: through needle-parks, in Madison and Stuyvesant Squares, in Greenwich Village, along the West Side Highway, in the Meatpacking District, on piers at the end of Christopher Street, alongside the trucks used for sexual encounters, at the Everard Baths in an airless cubicle. During these nighttime journeys, he encountered and photographed subjects in keeping with the genre of street photography, only these images were exemplars of the late 20th-century urban gay subculture. (Some titles include: “Boy on a Park Bench,” 1981; “Man Leaning Against Tree,” 1981; “Queen with Fur Stole, Halloween,” 1976.) Love & Lust has Hujar sequestered from the chaos of the city into the hermetic, private space of his studio, where he carefully composed images of sensuality, transfiguring nudes into constructions and examinations of identity—self-representations as Narcissus in the studio. A full-page ad for the exhibit featuring a self-portrait of Hujar appeared in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 2014). Never before has there been a photograph of a man in a jockstrap in the sedate literary magazine (Figure 3). Hujar’s unyielding gaze, his torso tilted and unguarded toward the viewer, removes any protective barriers between himself and us. At once ironic and challenging, he took an enormous risk with this very intimate self-portrait that cuts deeply to issues of identity, same-sex sexuality, masculinity, ego, and vulnerability. Hujar was ambivalent about his need for acceptance, repelled and drawn. Envious of others, he longed for fame and admission into the art world. He self-destructively misjudged opportunities that might have advanced his career, threatening gallery owners, snubbing or becoming argumentative with other photographers. And he was capable of uncontrollable rage. Cynthia Carr wrote in Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012) about several instances of Hujar’s pulsating rage, such as throwing an uninvited guest at a friend’s party down a flight of stairs; picking up a chair and smashing it into splinters during a heated argument, and hurling a barstool against a wall. In a catalog interview, “To Me They Look Like Peter,” Fran Lebowitz recalled: “He hit a gallery owner once. He would call to tell me about those fights.” Estate executor Stephen Koch has been a vigilant strategist in advancing Hujar’s legacy, remarking: “First I had to get him out of his personal ghetto. Then I had to get him out of a gay ghetto. Then I had to get him out of the downtown ghetto.” And yet, Hujar’s work is completely embedded in 20th-century, post-Stonewall social and cultural conventions and preoccupations: the examination of identity, performativity, and the depiction of the body. When viewing Hujar’s photographs, one is reminded of Walt Whitman’s lines: “Out from behind this bending rough-cut mask, these lights and shades, this drama of the whole, this common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in you for you, in each for each.” Hujar’s images make you think as much about yourself as the maker. They uncover fundamental realities by exposing a private act such as masturbation, putting the viewer in the embarrassing position of a voyeur, compelled to confront issues of attractiveness, temporality, mortality, sexual objectification, and even playfulness. Hujar unmasks himself through his work and reveals essential truths about us. Figures 1, 2, and 3: Courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. © The Estate of Peter Hujar. Steven F. Dansky, cofounder of OUTLoud: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers, has been an activist, photographer, and writer for more than fifty years.
