{"id":969,"date":"2026-07-17T17:39:01","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T17:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=969"},"modified":"2026-07-17T17:39:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T17:39:01","slug":"peter-hujars-search-for-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=969","title":{"rendered":"Peter Hujar\u2019s Search for Secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s a fine measure of the curator Joel Smith\u2019s visual and emotional acuity that the first standout images one encounters on entering \u201cHujar:Contact,\u201d his fabulous show of Peter Hujar\u2019s photographs and contact sheets (at the Morgan Library, through October 25th), are of the performer, writer, and director Jackie Curtis. Hujar, who was a friend of Curtis\u2019s, photographed him, circa 1970, in Jackie drag. (Curtis alternated between \u201cboy\u201d Jackie and \u201cgirl\u201d Jackie throughout his too brief life.) Resplendent in a dark top and flowered scarves, Jackie has his hair ratted out, creating a kind of nimbus around his poignant, ready-to-laugh face, which is powdered white, with shiny, metallic-looking paillettes around the eyes. It\u2019s a great face, a great look, one that speaks to\u2014or, more precisely, articulates\u2014hip, vital New York as it was during the years of Curtis\u2019s ascendancy, as a playwright at La Mama and as one of Andy Warhol\u2019s more comedically gifted superstars. Twiggy\u2019s youthquake glam was out. Something darker, funnier, and more lucid was taking the stage, dressed in down-at-the-heel platforms and stockings with runs and sporting Corey Tippin-inspired maquillage\u2014shaved eyebrows and brightly rouged cheeks. Gender, seemingly, was the least of anyone\u2019s problems, and who needed Broadway? One\u2019s life was the performance, and one\u2019s friends the only audience that really mattered.<\/p>\n

Read more Who Owns the Odyssey?<\/a><\/p>\n

You can see at least some of that spirit in the dozen or more frames of Jackie that Hujar shot in his studio, which was also his home\u2014a loft, at 189 Second Avenue, that was owned by Jackie\u2019s grandmother. With a minimum of props\u2014a chair here, a mattress there\u2014Hujar posed his sitters in front of a gray backdrop or a white wall. No matter how outrageous his subjects seem\u2014they include the San Francisco performance troupe the Cockettes and cast members from Robert Wilson\u2019s early spectacles\u2014his photographs are some of the most silent images I have ever seen. The silence grows out of Hujar\u2019s high style, the way the people he photographed appear motionless while their eyes are alive with thought and spirit. In his work, Hujar returned again and again to the spiritual life of his sitters\u2014an invisible presence in his images. Hujar\u2019s best pictures are still-lifes that feature not apples but queer fruit. The camera he habitually used in the studio, a 120-mm. twin-lens reflex, gave his photographs a strong graphic quality infused with warmth. It also allowed his subjects to see his face without a camera blocking it\u2014a handsome face, with pale skin, dark eyebrows, and a small mouth. But, as he looked down into the ground glass, his being wasn\u2019t the point; his sitter\u2019s was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Andrew Durbin\u2019s essential \u201cThe Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek,\u201d published earlier this year, Hujar told the writer Jill Johnston that he saw his photography as a \u201csearch.\u201d What he was searching for, Johnston concluded, were the secrets we have without knowing it. If we can\u2019t bear witness to ourselves, what allows the camera to dance in and draw us out? I think it begins with the implicit understanding that photographer and sitter are making a story together, with the sitter as protagonist, and sometimes the combined reality and artificiality of the exchange brings certain truths to the surface. When that didn\u2019t happen for Hujar, it was likely because of a sitter\u2019s resistance. In 1980, he invited members of the London-based drag troupe Bloolips to pose. The episode was described by the group\u2019s founder, Bette Bourne, in Cynthia Carr\u2019s \u201cFire in the Belly\u201d (2012), a graceful, affecting biography of the artist David Wojnarowicz, who was a friend of Hujar\u2019s. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t reveal,\u201d Bourne said. \u201cHujar\u2019s big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn\u2019t know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are. And then he could go inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It wasn\u2019t until I saw Hujar\u2019s pictures of Jackie Curtis at the Morgan that I began to see Jackie\u2019s dress-up as a display of innocence which evoked a time when little boys were not made to feel ashamed for playing with Mother\u2019s pearls or Sister\u2019s tea set. Just look at his eyes in the image, taken from the contact sheet of Jackie in drag, that Smith has hung near the entrance: they\u2019re the eyes of a newborn (albeit one with cigarette breath), seeing the world fresh and without fear. Next to this picture is a blowup of part of the contact sheet. One frame has been outlined in orange grease pencil with the word \u201cVogue\u201d written across the top. The implication: though Jackie couldn\u2019t have his Vogue<\/em> cover, because of the way the world was back then (and still is), Peter was determined to give him one. Jackie is not only Hujar\u2019s cover girl; he\u2019s also Smith\u2019s, a star among the fantastic performers, artists, writers, and leather queens whom Hujar photographed in the sixties and seventies, who bring such life<\/em> to this exhibition crackling with insight, density, and love. What we see, in the sectioned gallery of \u201cHujar:Contact,\u201d is all that New York created and made significant and lost in the thirty-two years\u2014from 1954 to 1986\u2014that the exhibition covers. (The Morgan houses nearly six thousand of Hujar\u2019s surviving contact sheets.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When I got to the end of the show, and happily turned around to walk through it again, one picture of Jackie stayed in my mind; it existed in memory and wasn\u2019t at the Morgan. Taken by Hujar in 1985, the black-and-white image shows Jackie in repose, dressed in a suit, with a fresh white flower in his buttonhole and a lovely drawing of him, in full makeup, positioned near his left shoulder. In this frame, Jackie\u2019s eyes are closed, his mouth shut, because he\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

Art remembers long after we have forgotten. Hujar\u2019s work is so rooted in transience and in the slippery nature of identity\u2014the quick shutter click between being and not being\u2014that mounting a show of his contact sheets makes great aesthetic and political sense: Who are we, moment by moment? What is our final image? Does death have a shape? A color? Hujar\u2019s exquisite early pictures, such as \u201cSeaweed\u201d or \u201cDead Fish, Fire Island,\u201d both from 1960-62, teach us how to see life\u2019s erosions. The former shows us nine images of seaweed that has washed up on the sand. Each strand is like a beautiful clump of calligraphy all tangled up in itself, as captivating and lonely as any earthwork. \u201cDead Fish, Fire Island\u201d\u2014whose title is self-explanatory\u2014tells us so much about time and the beauty of unadorned decomposition that we have to accept the knowledge that we ourselves are always in the process of decay.<\/p>\n

These early works also establish Hujar\u2019s sense of color within the black-and-white image. Throughout his career, he used gray tones to illuminate the mystery of his images. Gray dominates his thoughtful, sensual black-and-white portraits of his friend Susan Sontag reclining on a light-colored blanket and wearing a turtleneck, from 1975. Even his pictures taken outside can give the feeling that the world he\u2019s capturing is overcast\u2014as in his portraits of the trans activist Marsha\u00a0P. Johnson, so tender in her bonnet, on the Christopher Street Pier, on Easter Sunday, 1976. Hujar\u2019s gray is a curtain\u2014a scrim\u2014that he rarely lifts, bringing to mind Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s 1964 description of sea air: \u201cLike a first coat of whitewash when it\u2019s wet, \/ that thin gray mist lets everything show through.\u201d While his lighting is the light of romance: the queer cinema light that you see in early Richard Avedon and George Platt Lynes, transformed and flecked with danger and allure.<\/p>\n

But can we use the word \u201callure\u201d when it comes to Hujar\u2019s self-portraits with his mother from 1977? In the images at the Morgan, we see the tall, thin Hujar in a plaid shirt and jeans. His attractive mother, whom he always referred to as Rose Murphy when speaking with friends, is a head or so shorter than her son, standing by his side. Her hair is done just so. In some of the frames, Hujar\u2019s right arm is on his mother\u2019s shoulder. What could he have been hoping to record in these images, if anything?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He did not grow up with Rose. Soon after giving birth to him, in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934, she went to work as a waitress in Manhattan\u2014his father, Joseph John Hujar, a baker and maybe a bootlegger, had split before his birth\u2014and left Peter with her parents, Ukrainians who had a farm in Ewing Township. He spoke Ukrainian before English, and the farm animals were his earliest and most trusted friends. He got his first camera from Rose, on one of his visits to the city. As a boy, he took a picture of cows in the distance. The closeup portraits of cows and other animals that he took later were the first Hujar images I saw that I understood. They seemed to be marked by a kind of spiritual deprivation and longing\u2014the work of an orphaned child who wanted to connect with the other vulnerable creatures of the world. The animals in his photographs are monuments to the difference between man and beast; and, because the animals got here first, the images seem to say, they have ancient qualities that trump ours\u2014even those of the photographer and his modern camera. Like the French director Robert Bresson, in his unspeakably heart-wrenching 1966 film, \u201cAu Hasard Balthazar,\u201d which sees the world\u2014a black-and-white world with lots of gray\u2014through the eyes of a donkey, Hujar blames us humans for disfiguring the natural world with our cruelty and our neglect. His animals are infused with the weight of his childhood, his wounds.<\/p>\n

When Peter was eleven, his beloved grandmother died, and his grandfather, worried about how badly the boy was being treated by an uncle who lived with them, sent Peter to stay with Rose and her husband, Ed (Snookie) Murphy, a bookie, in their one-bedroom apartment on East Thirty-second Street. The Murphys drank; in Carr\u2019s \u201cFire in the Belly,\u201d Hujar\u2019s friends remember him being humiliated and dismissed by them. Nevertheless, at the School of Industrial Art, Hujar flourished under the tutelage of his English teacher, a young gay poet named Daisy Aldan, who not only supported Hujar\u2019s dream of becoming a photographer but introduced him to her chosen family\u2014other women, including the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who gathered at Aldan\u2019s on weekends to play poker.<\/p>\n

Sometime before Hujar graduated from high school, his mother threw a bottle at him, and he left her apartment for good, staying at first with friends. No one in his family came to his graduation, so he sat in the audience and, when his name was called, he applauded for himself.<\/p>\n

Durbin\u2019s book is visceral in its narrative drive; he wants you to feel what he feels about his subjects, and to share his admiration for Hujar\u2019s photographs. Inevitably, you are inspired to assess them for yourself. As I looked at photographs that Hujar had shot at the Capuchin Catacombs, in Palermo, in 1963\u2014a trip he made with his then lover and friend, the avant-garde artist Paul Thek\u2014I remembered why it had taken me years to get into Hujar\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Read more Mother Tongue<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After leaving home, Hujar, with Aldan\u2019s encouragement, worked for fifteen years as an assistant in various photo studios. In 1956, he became involved with the painter Joseph Raffael; two years later, the pair went off to Italy, where, given time and space, Hujar was able to find what interested him most as an artist: making images that explored tenderness and what we do or don\u2019t do to protect it. At the Morgan, there are about a dozen photographs that Hujar took at an institute for neurological disorders in Florence, in 1959. I was especially drawn to two of them. In each of these, a nun is helping a boy with his movement. The nun\u2019s habit falls in beautiful folds to the floor, and in one picture we see the child\u2019s head in profile, as though it were jutting out of the nun\u2019s wimple. In the second image, the nun faces the boy; she is smiling gently at him, and we see both figures in a mirror, the camera reflecting the reflection.<\/p>\n

Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, by which point he was involved with Thek. The two had met in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1956, but had been with other partners then. By 1961, they were together, albeit in a way that Durbin is right to point out was different from heterosexual coupling. First of all, at that time, a man could be arrested for loving another man, and the layers of complication in being together\u2014how out could you be, and how traditional in your expectations?\u2014no doubt amplified the vulnerability and the risk of their love. Hujar loved Thek, but Thek often needed to be away in order to make his work, and he became enmeshed in other situations, which sometimes involved women. (He and Sontag were lovers intermittently in the early sixties; she dedicated her 1966 collection, \u201cAgainst Interpretation,\u201d to Thek, whose ideas about making helped her declare, at the end of that now famous title essay, \u201cIn place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re never in love with the people you love,\u201d Hujar once said to a friend. \u201cBeing in love is all the anticipation; it can\u2019t really be there when you\u2019re actually with him.\u201d But, no matter what Hujar thought about love, it was, in the end, just thought, his own hermeneutics of the erotic. Ultimately, for him, love was probably driven by fear. Fear provoked his legendary rages\u2014breaking chairs, throwing things, cutting people out of his life. Fear of the injury caused by others\u2019 words and actions, which was his primary experience of love.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I think that, when I first saw Hujar\u2019s pictures of the catacombs in Palermo, in the only book he published during his lifetime, \u201cPortraits in Life and Death,\u201d from 1976, I was less taken by the gothic nature of all those bodies in repose\u2014mouths sometimes open or twisted in a grimace, hands folded over hearts that had long ago dried up\u2014than put off by Hujar\u2019s interest in a death drama that was gawked at, rather than observed and felt. His eye does not live in these pictures; it\u2019s subsumed by them. The truth is that I discovered the book in the early eighties, when so many people were dying or beginning to die, and the catacomb pictures felt too easy to me, like talismans in a collapsing world\u2014my collapsing world\u2014which was infected with a form of death that would take Hujar in 1987, and Thek a year later, and Wojnarowicz in 1992, the same year that Marsha\u00a0P. Johnson died, probably the victim of a hate crime.<\/p>\n

Avedon, whose work and career had a big influence on Hujar early on, had produced a series of images of the Palermo catacombs in 1959. (Avedon\u2019s final large-scale fashion story, which appeared in this magazine in 1995, showed a live model cavorting with skeletons in a version of the catacombs.) And, when I turned to Robert Mapplethorpe at about the same time that I first saw Hujar\u2019s book, I was reminded of another Sontag essay, \u201cFascinating Fascism,\u201d in which she writes that the Marquis de Sade<\/p>\n

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had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising\u00a0the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hujar, like Avedon before him and Mapplethorpe after him, had a fairy\u2019s love of costume and an understanding of appearance as an expression less of truth than of lies\u2014lies about who we were and are, just like the lies that gay men had to tell in order to be themselves in Hujar\u2019s time. The images of the mummified bodies in the Palermo catacombs, wearing the clothes of whoever they used to be, struck me not as beautiful or true but as evidence of Hujar\u2019s interest in display and fiction. Where was the \u201ctruth\u201d in these pictures? What did we become when we marvelled at a dead child\u2019s hair ribbon, or a mouth stretched in a scream? We all die, but not all of us view existence as a pathway to death, or death as the ultimate game of dress-up. I side with Philip Larkin\u2019s \u201cAn Arundel Tomb,\u201d which says of depictions of the dead, \u201cTime has transfigured them into untruth.\u201d Truth happens only when we\u2019re alive to write it, to photograph it, to live it. I didn\u2019t think of Hujar\u2019s catacomb pictures as a testament to the artist\u2019s ecstatic honesty, or even as an example of perversion, in which the ghastly truth of those corpses, mediated by the camera, was a kind of payback to society and the law. I closed \u201cPortraits in Life and Death\u201d and didn\u2019t look at it again for years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After Hujar returned to the States from Italy, in 1964, he took a job as an assistant to the commercial photographer Harold Krieger. A few years later, he was admitted to a master class that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel held in Avedon\u2019s studio, and, emboldened by their support, he quit the Krieger gig and opened his own studio for a time. By 1973, he was determined to work independently as an artist. Carr writes, \u201cHe had disdain for the whole process of selling himself. Fran Lebowitz pointed out that \u2018he also had a profound distrust of authority, and that he couldn\u2019t make a distinction between someone who owned some little photography gallery, and the Pope.\u2019\u00a0\u201d To get the check, you have to kiss the ring, and Hujar couldn\u2019t. So he lived as he lived. He was \u201cthe poorest grown-up I have been personally close to in my life,\u201d his executor, the writer Stephen Koch, once said.<\/p>\n

The portraits he made between 1965 and 1975 are phenomenal and often sexy, particularly those of his close friends Lebowitz and the writer Vince Aletti, seen in different beds in Lebowitz\u2019s childhood home in New Jersey; of the artist Brigid Berlin for New Times<\/em> magazine; and of the fashion model Maxime de la Falaise, her husband the curator John McKendry, and her daughter, Loulou de la Falaise, in 1968. In his portraits of that fashionable family, Hujar suggests the world they came from, one where you wouldn\u2019t blink an eye at a topless woman winking at you;<\/em> by then, flirting had been replaced by the art of the put-on. One of the strongest contact sheets from this time period is of the fashion editor Diana Vreeland. In Hujar\u2019s images, this formidable woman is drained of esprit; what remains is the mask. Fame does not console. Vreeland\u2019s isolation is Rose Murphy\u2019s isolation and her son\u2019s as well. And it\u2019s a godless place.<\/p>\n

I stayed a long time in this part of the show, a fabulous wonderland in which the photographer leaves behind the entombed and joins life as much as he can, and his voice rings out loud and clear and essential. Smith notes in his very helpful catalogue essay, which is supplemented by Olivia McCall\u2019s thorough annotation of the contact sheets, that it was during this period that Hujar became interested in posing subjects in groups, gatherings of theatre people, activists, chosen families of a kind. And, as I looked at his contact sheets of the Cockettes, shot in 3:4, and his great 35-mm. picture of the Gay Liberation Front (1970), I thrilled to the energy of the images, every one of them, because they were about joy\u2014even though Hujar had a hard time feeling it himself. But who can blame him? You can take the fatherless boy out of his belligerent mother\u2019s home, but you can\u2019t take the parents out of the boy. Looking at the Cockettes, those wonderful queens in their thrift-store finery, and knowing that they bombed when they tried to put on a show in New York\u2014too much California hippie love and drift for the professional-minded New York audience\u2014and looking, too, at all those smiling, committed, excited people with the Gay Liberation Front, seeming to rush toward Hujar\u2019s lens, I remembered how, when I was a photo editor in the late eighties and early nineties, before digital was the dominant format, and a photographer came to show me images, what I most wanted to see was not the single image but the contact sheet and what it represented: it was evidence of the photographer\u2019s hope, evidence of the dreams that he, she, or they didn\u2019t even know they were having.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Paul Thek\u2019s Eclectic Art<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hilton Als reviews \u201cHujar:Contact,\u201d at the Morgan Library. The photographer\u2019s portraits bring certain truths to the surface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-critic-at-large"],"yoast_head":"\nPeter Hujar\u2019s Search for Secrets - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=969\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peter Hujar\u2019s Search for Secrets - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hilton Als reviews \u201cHujar:Contact,\u201d at the Morgan Library. 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