10/11/2016 Antony Hegarty pays tribute to the photographer Peter Hujar | Life and style | The Guardian

The outsiders
In the 1970s and 80s, Peter Hujar photographed New York and its underground elite - and was there when
Aids began to take its toll. Musician Antony Hegarty pays tribute to an unsung master
Antony Hegarty
Saturday 1 December 2007 23.41GMT

Twenty years after his Aids-related death, the work of underground New York photographer
Peter Hujar has made it to the UK for a show at the ICA. It's a turn of events I could once have
only dreamed of.
When I arrived in New York as a student in 1990, the streets and bars of Manhattan's East and
West Villages were populated by as many ghosts as there were denizens. It was like a night sky
missing half its brightest stars. Between 1982 and 1994, Ridiculous Theatrical Company
director Charles Ludlam, new wave singer Klaus Nomi, drag performer and playwright Ethyl
Eichelberger, underground lm-maker Jack Smith, Cockettes founder Hibiscus, painter David
Wojnarowicz, gay activist Vito Russo, cabaret singer John Sex, cult actress Cookie Mueller and
Hujar himself all died of Aids-related illnesses, along with thousands of others. Shortly after
performance artist Leigh Bowery died at the end of 1994 in London, the rst eective anti-
viral medications became available and that seemingly unstoppable wave of death subsided -
but many of New York's most important artists and thinkers of two generations were already
gone.

At the time there was a fear that their stories would never be told. As a student in 1991 I
interviewed local drag queen Hattie Hathaway, gathering scraps of oral history, and after I left
school, I worked as an overnight waitress on Avenue A and got to know all the street queens
and junkies. I remember one of them marvelling once how Jack Smith's belongings were
locked up in garbage bags in someone's basement. Walking down East 10th Street one evening
in 1992, I was amazed to nd in the garbage a piece of artwork by David Wojnarowicz. I
suspected that some landlord had tossed it into the roadside while clearing another freshly
"vacated" apartment.

Now at last the work of some of these lost visionaries is beginning to emerge in biographical
lms, exhibitions and screenings. Accordingly, Hujar, without doubt one of the 20th century's
greatest, if unsung, photographers, is nally getting more recognition.

In 1976, Hujar curated the only major presentation of his photographs he was to oversee in his
lifetime, which he entitled Portraits In Life And Death. Comprised of two sections, the rst part
of the exhibition contained portraits of artists and friends from the downtown New York scene,
mostly pensive and reclining. Then followed a series of portraits of petried corpses Hujar had
photographed during a trip to the catacombs in Palermo, Sicily. His black-and-white images
were presented in a square format, and printed masterfully in rich, deep tones. Hujar's classical
sense of composition was formal and exacting. The overall eect of the series was stunning
and eerie. Every portrait whispered of transitory presence, mystery and oblivion.

Between the early 70s and mid-80s, Hujar photographed his friends and members of his
extended community in NYC, from Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag to downtown artists and
drag performers, such as Lola Pasholinksi and Agosto Machado. He took pictures of outsiders

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10/11/2016 Antony Hegarty pays tribute to the photographer Peter Hujar | Life and style | The Guardian

from an insider's perspective. The experience of extreme alienation and private soulfulness is
what Hujar seems to have shared with his subjects, and elevated in his portraits of them. He
photographed the world he inhabited: his lovers and sex partners in various states of undress
and arousal, the men cruising the trucks and piers he frequented, the collapsing piers
themselves, the empty lots, the dimly lit streets. Hujar's preoccupation with mortality
informed all his work. His portraits stare right into the souls of his subjects, and often they
gaze back with a stoic knowledge of their mortal predicament.

In one of his most iconic portraits, and the one I was lucky enough to procure as the cover for
my last [Antony And The Johnsons] album, I Am A Bird Now, Candy Darling lies in her hospital
bed, dying of leukaemia, her dark eyes gazing hypnotically at the camera from underneath
white sheets. She looks transcendental in her beauty, suspended between male and female,
light and shadow, life and death. When I visited the executor of Hujar's estate, I was shown
images he had taken at Darling's funeral. The Warhol superstar was laid out in an open casket,
her body waxen and besieged with owers. Hujar obsessively circled this theme of death and
the passage of time - in his picture of a cat's corpse as it curled into death, decomposing on the
dark grey gravel; in the silhouette of a thin, neglected dog as it sat chained up in a kennel; even
in a solitary bush as it grew, thick with fresh leaves, imbued with an elusive radiance.

Hujar was respected by his peers and revered by those who took inspiration from him (Nan
Goldin among them). In the art world he was marginalised, known for being volatile and at
times uncooperative. He lived without assets, sometimes without enough money to eat. He
died in 1987. His lover, David Wojnarowicz, took photographs of his body as it lay on the
hospital cot: Hujar's face, frozen in a stark and rapturous expression; his foot; his hand; his
body lay there bathed in the neon light of the hospital corridor.

The Peter Hujar retrospective at the ICA, London SW1, runs from December 5 to January 27,
ica.org.uk

Topics
New York

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