• Source: Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar (; October 11, 1934 – November 26, 1987) was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits. 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.




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. The household was abusive, and in 1950, when Hujar was 16, he left home and began to live independently.




Education


Hujar received his first camera in 1947 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.Ref? 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, 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.. 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, so 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.
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. "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. 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.




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. 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.
Hujar willed his estate to his lifelong friend Stephen Koch, who administers it since (today as Peter Hujar Archive). 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


Peter Hujar. Portraits in Life and Death. New York: Da Capo, 1976, ISBN 0-306-70755-1, ISBN 0-306-80038-1. Introduction by Susan Sontag.
Reissue: New York: W. W. Norton / Liveright, 2024, ISBN 978-1-324-09217-9. Foreword by Benjamin Moser.
Peter Weiermair (ed.). Peter Hujar. Innsbruck, Austria: Allerheiligenpresse, 1981. Contributions by Jean-Christophe Ammann and Dieter Hall.
Peter Hujar. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University, 1990, ISBN 0-934349-07-X. Texts by Stephen Koch and Thomas Sokolowski, interviews by Fran Lebowitz and Vince Aletti.
Urs Stahel, Hripsimé Visser (eds.). Peter Hujar: A Retrospective. Zurich, Switzerland: Scalo, 1994, ISBN 1-881616-35-5. Foreword by Urs Stahel, texts by Hripsimé Visser, Max Kozloff, and Stephen Koch; mementos by Jean-Christophe Amann, Nan Goldin, Marvin Heiferman, John Heys, Fran Lebowitz a. o.
Klaus Kertess. Peter Hujar: Animals and Nudes. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms, 2002, ISBN 0-944092-95-0.
Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery; Göttingen: Steidl, 2016, ISBN 978-3-95829-106-5. Text by Vince Aletti.
Peter Hujar – Speed of Life. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre; New York: Aperture, 2017, ISBN 978-1-59711-414-1; original Spanish edition: A la velocidad de la vida, ISBN 978-84-9844-608-1; paperback edition in French, 2019, ISBN 978-2-915704-89-1. Contributions by Philip Gefter, Joel Smith, Steve Turtell and Martha Scott Burton.
Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar – The Shabbiness of Beauty. London: Mack, 2021, ISBN 978-1-913620-20-2.
Linda Rosencrantz. Peter Hujar's Day, Magic Hour, 2022, ISBN 978-1-63944-267-6. Transcription of the chronicle of Hujar's December 19, 1974 as told by him and recorded by Rosencrantz. Introduction by Stephen Koch.
Steve Lawrence with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick (eds.). Newspaper. Primary Information, 2023, ISBN 978-1-7377979-4-4. Facsimile of all 14 issues from 1969 to 1971 in one book.
Peter Hujar: Rialto, Rodovid Press 2024, ISBN 978-617-7482-65-8.
Gary Schneider. Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom. BookCrave (Artbook D.A.P.), 2024, ISBN 979-8-21837146-3.




= Further reading

=
Mary-Kay Lombino.Subterranean Monuments: Burckhardt, Johnson, Hujar (exhibition magazine). Poughkeepsie, NY: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2006.
Lorenzo Fusi. Changing Difference: Queer Politics and Shifting Identities: Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Smith (exhibition catalogue). Milan, Italy: Silvana, 2013, ISBN 978-88-366-2506-2.
Gary Schneider. Salters Cottages. New York: Dashwood Books, 2019, ISBN 978-0-9966574-6-4.




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.

1974: as part of Recent Acquisitions, Floating Foundation of Photography, New York
1975: Portfolio by Peter Hujar, Foto Gallery, New York (alongside Christopher Makos: Pictures from a Suitcase)
1977: Catskill Center for Photography, Woodstock, New York
1978: Peter Hujar: Photographs, Port Washington Public Library, New York
1979: Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery, New York
1980: La Remise du Parc, Paris, Franc
1980: Tiroler Landesmuseen, Innsbruck
Museum Moderner Kunst Wien
1981: Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, Robert Samuel Gallery, New York
1982: Larry Clark / Peter Hujar, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (catalogue), expanded to
Peter Hujar / Larry Clark / Robert Mapplethorpe, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland
1982: Galerie Jurka, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
1982: Galerie Nagel, Berlin, Germany
1983: Forum Stadtpark, Graz, and Modern Art Galerie, Vienna, Austria
1986: Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York




= 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.

1989: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York, and
Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
1994: Peter Hujar: A Retrospective, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands, and
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
in 1995 as Peter Hujar. A Charm in Life and Death, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany
1996: Peter Hujar: Das photographische Werk, DAAD-Galerie, Berlin, Germany (no catalogue)
1999: Peter Hujar: Intimate Survey, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
2005: Peter Hujar – Night, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, and
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston
Scalo Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland
2005: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York
2007: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
2008: Paul P. / When Ghost Meets Ghost / Peter Hujar, Maureen Paley Gallery, London, UK
2009: Peter Hujar: Photographs 1956–1958, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
2010: Peter Hujar: Thek's Studio 1967, Alexander von Bonin, New York, and
Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland
Maureen Paley Gallery, London
2014: Peter Hujar: Love & Lust, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, California
2017–2019: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, Mapfre, Barcelona, Spain; traveled to
Fotomuseum Den Hague, The Netherlands
Morgan Library & Museum, New York
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France
2020: Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin
2022: Peter Hujar curated by Elton John, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
2023: Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
2024: Peter Hujar: Rialto, Ukrainian Museum, New York
2024: Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death, Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice, Italy, on th occasion of the 60. Venice Biennale




Collections


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

New York
Brooklyn Museum
Morgan Library & Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum of Modern Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Carnegie Museum of Art, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California
Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
UK and Europe

Folkwang Museum Essen, Germany
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Tate Modern, London, UK: 10 prints (as of May 2021)




References






External links


Peter Hujar Archive
Morgan Library & Museum
artnet
Visual AIDS
Christie's

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Daftar orang positif HIV
• Peter Hujar
• Stephen Koch (writer)
• David Wojnarowicz
• Linda Rosenkrantz
• Anohni
• I Am a Bird Now
• A Little Life
• Nan Goldin
• Candy Darling
• Fran Lebowitz