Peter Hujar Explained

Peter Hujar
Birth Date:October 11, 1934
Birth Place:Trenton, New Jersey, U.S.
Death Place:New York City, U.S.
Resting Place:Gate of Heaven Cemetery
Known For:Black & white portrait photography

Peter Hujar (;[1] October 11, 1934 – November 26, 1987) was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits.[2] [3] [4] [5] Hujar's work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime, but he has since been recognized as a major American photographer of the 1970s and 80s.[2] [3]

Early life

Hujar was born on October 11, 1934, in Trenton, New Jersey, to Rose Murphy, a waitress, who was abandoned by her husband during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents on their farm, where he spoke only Ukrainian until he started school. He remained on the farm until his grandmother's death in 1946, and his mother took him to New York City to live with her and her second husband in their one-room apartment.[6] The household was abusive, and in 1950, when Hujar was 16, he left home and began to live independently.[7]

Education

Hujar received his first camera in 1947[8] and in 1953 entered the School of Industrial Art where he expressed interest in being a photographer. He encountered an encouraging teacher, the poet Daisy Aldan (1923–2001), and following her advice he became a commercial photography apprentice.[9] Apart from classes in photography during high school, Hujar's photographic education and technical mastery was acquired in commercial photo studios, where he could use the darkroom during afterhours. By 1957, when he was age 23 he was making photographs now considered to be of museum quality. Early in 1967, he was one of a select group of young photographers in a master class taught by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, where he met Alexey Brodovitch and Diane Arbus.

Artistic career

In 1958, Hujar accompanied the artist Joseph Raffael on a Fulbright to Italy. In 1963, he secured his own Fulbright and returned to Italy with Paul Thek, whom he had been dating since 1959,[10] where they explored and photographed the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, images of the dead later featured in Portraits in Life and Death.

In 1964, Hujar returned to America and became a chief assistant in the studio of the commercial photographer Harold Krieger. Around this time, he met Andy Warhol, posed for four of Warhol's three-minute Screen Tests and was included in the compilation film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys that was assembled from Screen Tests.

Hujar quit his job in commercial photography in 1967, and at great financial sacrifice, began to pursue primarily his own art work that reflected his homosexual milieu. He was an influential artist-activist of the gay liberation movement; in 1969, with his lover, the political activist Jim Fouratt, he witnessed the Stonewall riots in the West Village. At the urging of Fouratt, he documented the first gay liberation march (June 28, 1970), and took the now somewhat ironic photo "Come out!!" for the Gay Liberation Front..[11] After their break-up at the end of the year he had to move into his studio (on 10 East 23rd St) until mid-1972, and in spring 1973 could finally move into a loft above The Eden Theater at 189 2nd Avenue in the East Village, formerly occupied by Jackie Curtis. Hujar transformed the space in such a way that he could live and work there for the rest of his life.

Portraits in Life and Death

At the end of 1974 he had an exhibition at the Foto Gallery on 492 Broome St, alongside pictures by Christopher Makos, where he didn't sell any of his work, but according to a friend gained a book contract with Da Capo Press. The following months he took many portraits to include them in the book. Beside his friends like Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and Vince Aletti, he portrayed artists like John Waters, drag queen actor Divine and writer William Burroughs. In the final book published in 1976, the portraits were juxtaposed by a selection of the pictures he took of the corpses in the Catacombs of Palermo in 1963. Susan Sontag (in a hospital at the time) wrote an introduction for the sequence of 41 images of Portraits in Life and Death. The book got a tepid reception, and only later became a classic in American photography (It was reissued in 2024).

The 1980s

In early 1981, Hujar met the young artist David Wojnarowicz, and after a brief period as Hujar's lover, Wojnarowicz became a protégé linked to Hujar for the remainder of the photographer's life. Hujar remained instrumental in all phases of Wojnarowicz's emergence as an important young artist.[12]

Another artist closely linked with Hujar is Robert Mapplethorpe. Both artists were gay white men who excelled at portrait photography and who made unashamedly homoerotic work that walked the line between pornography and fine art, but they were structural opposites. If Mapplethorpe reduced his subjects to abstract forms, his sitter's faces to masks, his nude models to sculptures, then Hujar emphasized his sitters' idiosyncrasies, their irreducible qualities, their human sentience over their fleshy geometry.[13] "Orgasmic Man", one of Hujar's more memorable works, is also a key difference between his work and Mapplethorpe's; never once, in all of Mapplethorpe's editioned photographs, did he show orgasm or ejaculation nor did he depict the concomitant facial expressions.

Hujar had a wide array of subjects in his photography, including cityscapes and urban still lifes, animals, nudes, abandoned buildings, and European ruins. His photography, which was mostly in black and white, has been described as conveying an intimacy, suggestive of both love and loss.[14] One aspect of this intimate quality was Hujar's ability to connect with his sitters. One of his models was quoted after an unsuccessful session as saying:

"We couldn't ‘reveal.’ As an actor you have to reveal. And Hujar's big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn't know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are...You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone. That's what Peter wanted and that was his great, great talent and skill."

Hujar's portraits, the subject of the first half of the one book he published while he was alive, are simple; he almost never used props and the focus of his work was on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot. Usually, his subjects either were sitting or posing in a recumbent way.[15]

Death and legacy

In January 1987, Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS. He died 10 months later, aged 53, on November 25 at Cabrini Medical Center in New York.[16] His funeral was held at Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, and he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.[17]

Hujar willed his estate to his lifelong friend Stephen Koch, who administers it since (today as Peter Hujar Archive).[3] A first retrospective of Hujar's work in collaboration with the estate was shown two years after his death at the Grey Art Gallery & Study Center of New York University. It was followed by a more comprehensive show in 1994 by a joined effort of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Netherlands) and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2013 the Morgan Library & Museum in New York acquired a hundred prints and the entirety of his written estate and all contact sheets from the Peter Hujar Archive. A collaboration between the Morgan Library and the Spanish Mapfre Foundation enabled a major travelling retrospective exhibition that was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph published in conjunction with Aperture in 2017.

Publications

Further reading

Exhibitions

This list follows the comprehensive compilation of the exhibitions of Hujar's work until 2017 provided by Joel Smith in the Mapfre/Aperture monograph Speed of Life. All solo exhibitions in his lifetime are named here, while most group shows were omitted.

Posthumous exhibitions

After his death several commercial galleries showed his work in (solo) exhibitions, like James Danziger (1991, 1992, 1998), Paula Cooper (1993, 2002), Wessel and O'Connor (1998), all situated in New York, Stephen Daiter in Chicago, Yezerski in Boston, and Berinson in Berlin (all three in 1999), Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels (1996), Renée Ziegler (1990) and Mai 36 (2002, 2010) in Zurich, and Maureen Paley and Marietta Neuss in London (both 2008). Closely engaged with the Peter Hujar Archive since the 2000s and regularly arranging shows of Hujar's work are Matthew Marks (first in 2000) and Pace/MacGill (since 2013) in New York, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (since 2002), and Maureen Paley in London (since 2008). Listed here are just the gallery shows which were accompanied by a catalogue, in addition to all solo shows in public institutions.

Collections

Hujar's work is held in the following collections (a. o.):
USA

UK and Europe

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Say How: H . National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled . October 24, 2023.
  2. News: Cotter . Holland . He Made Them Glow: A Maverick's Portraits Live On . The New York Times . February 8, 2018 . December 15, 2019 . 0362-4331.
  3. Schjeldahl . Peter . The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar . . January 29, 2018 . December 15, 2019 . 0028-792X . December 1, 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20191201034438/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-bohemian-rhapsody-of-peter-hujar . live .
  4. News: Symonds . Alexandria . The Most Exacting Photographer in Downtown '70s New York . The New York Times . February 2, 2016 . December 15, 2019 . 0362-4331 . October 20, 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20191020225409/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/t-magazine/art/photographer-peter-hujar-lost-downtown-70s-new-york.html . live .
  5. News: Bowcock . Simon . Peter Hujar: The Photographer Who Defined Downtown New York . The Guardian . October 14, 2016 . December 15, 2019 . 0261-3077.
  6. Book: Smith, Joel . Peter Hujar – Speed of Life . A Gorgeous Mental Discretion. 2017 . Fundación Mapfre and Aperture . Madrid and New York. 978-1-59711-414-1 . 13f.
  7. Book: Carr. Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. 2012. Bloomsbury. New York. 978-1-59691-533-6. 181.
  8. Web site: Peter Hujar . press release . Maureen Paley. 4 November 2014. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20141104235114/http://www.maureenpaley.com/exhibitions/future/peter-hujar/press. 4 November 2014.
  9. Book: Carr, C. . Cynthia Carr . Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz . . July 17, 2012 . 181.
  10. Web site: Paul Thek . 2024-10-14 . The Mayor Gallery . en . July 21, 2024 . https://web.archive.org/web/20240721124659/https://www.mayorgallery.com/artists/266-paul-thek/ . live .
  11. Adams . Harrison . Peter Hujar: Shamelessness Without Shame . Criticism . 63 . 4 . 319 . 2021 . 0011-1589 . 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319 . 245138589.
  12. Book: Carr, Cynthia . Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. 2012. Bloomsbury. New York. 978-1-59691-533-6 . 182.
  13. Adams, Harrison. Photography in the First Person: Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann (Dissertation). Yale University, 2018.
  14. Jones, Louis B. "His Queer Shoulder". The Threepenny Review, vol. 145, 2016, pp. 6–9. Accessed 15 May 2022.
  15. Book: Hujar . Peter . Sontag . Susan . Portraits in Life and Death . Da Capo Press . 1976 . 1074015771.
  16. News: Peter Hujar Dies at 53; Made Photo Portraits . The New York Times . November 28, 1987.
  17. Book: Carr, Cynthia . Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. 2012. Bloomsbury. New York. 978-1-59691-533-6 . 379.
  18. https://archive.org/details/portraitsinlifed0000huja Portraits in Life and Death
  19. https://www.galeriebuchholz.de/exhibitions/moyra-davey-peter-hujar-berlin-2020#?_ec=text||de Introductory text by Moyra Davey
  20. https://www.garyschneider.net/image-portfolios/salters-cottages-film,-book-and-film-stills-1981-2019/ Salters Cottages
  21. According to a listing compiled by the Fraenkel Gallery and provided as a Pdf. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  22. https://www.kunstmuseum.de/en/exhibition/peter-hujar-eine-anmut-von-leben-und-tod-fotografien-von-1963-1985/ Peter Hujar: Eine Anmut von Leben und Tod. Fotografien von 1963–1985. 18. 2. – 23. 4. 1995
  23. Web site: 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar . The Museum of Modern Art.
  24. News: Pitman. Joanna. 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar's Love for the Lonely. 0140-0460. The Times.
  25. Web site: 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar. Institute of Contemporary Arts. June 2, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210602212637/https://archive.ica.art/whats-on/peter-hujar. live.
  26. Web site: 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar photography exhibition. Fundación MAPFRE.
  27. Web site: . 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar. 8 May 2017. Fotomuseumdenhaag.nl.
  28. Web site: 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. bampfa.org. April 16, 2018 .
  29. Web site: 2021-05-29. Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. Wexner Center for the Arts.
  30. Web site: 2021-05-29. Top 10 photography shows of 2019. 16 December 2019. The Guardian.
  31. Web site: Manning. Emily. 2021-05-29. Inside the First Major Retrospective of Peter Hujar's Evocative Portraits. 25 January 2017. i-D/Vice. June 2, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210602214222/https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/kzwapw/inside-the-first-major-retrospective-of-peter-hujars-evocative-portraits. dead.
  32. https://www.galeriebuchholz.de/exhibitions/moyra-davey-peter-hujar-berlin-2020#?_ec=text||de Introductory text by Moyra Davey
  33. Web site: Features . Hannah . Silver . 2024-05-25 . A Snapshot of the Bohemian Downtown: Peter Hujar's Early Photography on Show in New York . 2024-09-30 . Wallpaper.com . December 2, 2024 . https://web.archive.org/web/20241202135338/https://www.wallpaper.com/art/photography/a-snapshot-of-the-bohemian-downtown-peter-hujars-early-photography-on-show-in-new-york . live .
  34. Web site: Press release . . . Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death – Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Calle della Pietà, Castello 3703) . 2024-10-09 . Peter Hujar Archive . July 27, 2024 . https://web.archive.org/web/20240727100600/https://peterhujararchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/RELEASE_Peter-Hujar-Portraits-in-Life-and-Death_eng.pdf . live .
  35. Web site: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. January 11, 2017. The Morgan Library & Museum. February 28, 2019. March 1, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190301074458/https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/peter-hujar. live.
  36. Web site: Peter Hujar | MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art.
  37. Web site: Peter Hujar. Whitney.org. February 28, 2019. March 1, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190301074407/https://whitney.org/artists/3952. live.
  38. Web site: Peter Hujar. The Art Institute of Chicago. 1934 .
  39. Web site: CMOA Collection. Collection.cmoa.org. December 15, 2019. April 8, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220408023852/https://collection.cmoa.org/?creator=Peter+Hujar&page=1&perPage=20&view=grid. live.
  40. Web site: Harvard Art Museums. Harvardartmuseums.org.
  41. Web site: Peter Hujar (American, 1934 - 1987) (Getty Museum). The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. February 28, 2019. March 1, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190301013457/http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1496/peter-hujar-american-1934-1987/. live.
  42. Web site: Works – Peter Hujar – Artists/Makers – The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Art.nelson-atkins.org. February 28, 2019. March 1, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190301013424/https://art.nelson-atkins.org/people/10625/peter-hujar/objects. live.
  43. Web site: Candy Darling on Her Deathbed. SLAM.org. July 9, 2023. July 9, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230709170434/https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/68292/. live.
  44. Web site: Peter Hujar. SFMOMA.org. February 28, 2019. December 6, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233607/https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/peter_hujar/. live.
  45. Web site: Peter Hujar. Walkerart.org. December 15, 2019. December 15, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20191215151041/https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/peter-hujar. live.
  46. Web site: Untitled | Yale University Art Gallery. Artgallery.yale.edu. February 28, 2019. November 5, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20151105113659/http://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/118311. live.
  47. Web site: Peter Hujar. Stedelijk.nl.
  48. Web site: 2021-05-30. Peter Hujar 1934–1987. Tate.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Peter Hujar".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2025, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.