On Photographer Peter Hujar: An Interview With Gary Schneider
The work of photographer Peter Hujar seems to be everywhere these days. He died at 53 in 1987, but his work still appears in countless bookstores and exhibitions, partially due to the now legendary fame of his subjects like Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, Susan Sontag and Candy Darling—Anohni has reunited with the Johnsons—and partially because of the quality of the photographs was such that they’d be appealing no matter who their subjects were. “He wouldn’t have been surprised by this,” a friend recently told the New York Times of his revival. “He knew he was good.” Among these latest offerings is Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom by Gary Schneider, Hujar’s printer and sometimes subject, whom we caught up with to hear about what it was like to work with this great photographer.
In the introduction to the book, you mention your early encounters with Hujar, which included his coming to your performance at Artists Space. What was your first impression of him?
When I first met Peter, we had an easy time communicating. He was able to communicate with me directly, and I was certainly interested in all he had to say about anything and everything. He also really listened. We talked a lot about photography in general. I’m not certain if I chose Peter as my mentor or if he chose me or he allowed me to be his mentee. I was an aggressively hungry young person for knowledge, and Peter had an innate wisdom that was incredibly attractive to me. I was flattered that he came to my performance at Artists Space and relieved that he had such positive things to say about the performance and my installation of photographs that accompanied it, especially about my ability to print them.
From a technical perspective, what is it like to print his work? What are the difficulties there?
Peter is the most complicated artist I ever printed. Firstly, he was a great printer of his own work; each image was transformed in many ways when he printed it, and when I am making a print, I must understand why he did that and uncover his desire for each image. I need to discover what he was looking for when printing an image because he was very specifically manipulating the image in the darkroom to control how he wanted the viewer to read the narrative—what he wanted them to see first, second and so on.
When I printed for Peter in the last year of his life, I worked very closely with him proofing the prints, and I can actually recall certain directions that he gave me, like how to make the halo around the Will Shar Pei (I), 1985. When I started printing for him posthumously more than two decades later, the available silver papers could no longer render the kinds of tonalities that his were able to achieve, and I discovered that printing his images digitally was the only option available for me to achieve the complexities of his vision.
Peter Hujar was notoriously hard to work with. Beyond your technical abilities, how did you earn his trust?
Peter was never hard to work with. He was my friend, and as such, we had total trust in each other. We never had to earn that trust; it was evident from our earliest meetings. It helped that I met him through my spouse John Erdman who had known him for a long time, and they trusted each other.
“Portraits in Life and Death” has just been reprinted, and there was a lovely presentation of photographs from it in Venice this year. Why do you think Hujar’s work is having a moment? What does it still have to say to us?
It’s difficult for me to answer your question. Peter and all those who knew his work believed that his work deserved great attention, even the level of attention it is getting now. The work is still gaining attention with a broader audience and also a younger audience. I hear from people that it was this or that image that they had up on their walls when they were young, searching for their identity.
I printed all the images for the exhibition in Venice. I’m also printing for a January exhibition at Raven Row in London that John Douglas Millar invited me to co-curate with him. That show has more posthumous prints than any museum exhibition to date.
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I made all the files for the Portraits in Life and Death reprint, and I was on press quality controlling both it and my book. I need to thank Stephen Koch from the Hujar Archive who made me the technical adviser on the book, and Bill Rusin from Liveright, who said to me from the get-go that we could print the reprint at the press I thought was best and on the paper I chose. I printed it at Trifolio, in Verona—Jeffrey Fraenkel’s printer of choice for Hujar. It was the best printing experience I’ve had so far.
You describe Hujar’s famous photograph of you in contortion as “a complex… both a portrait and a still life.” How else do you feel about it?
This image is powerful because it straddles both genres that interested Peter so much. Most of all, I’m so proud to have this portrait of me by him. As I say in my book, I really wanted to give Peter what he wanted. I had known him for two years when he photographed me in the studio. Maybe because I was so serious about the session and had so much love and respect for him, the intimacy became the real subject of this session, with this image being the most significant and also on the last roll of the session.
The series of photos in this book taken in Stuyvesant Park are excellent. Was cruising really so inherently cinematic?
Absolutely, cruising was inherently cinematic. Both Peter and I were interested in this aspect of it. But I also think Peter’s way of photographing is cinematic in how the sessions unfolded. People costumed themselves in order to attract who they wanted to attract, and they were all playing cat and mouse publicly. Stuyvesant Park, described in my book, the piers and the trucks were theatrical sets to play out these courting rituals. And I was also lucky that Peter appeared in my film, Salters Cottages from that year, which is really about the theatricality of cruising.
What do you think Hujar would have made of today’s East Village?
It’s hard to know what Peter would have thought. My friends who had great deals on rentals, and Peter did, and have been in them since the seventies or earlier, have very mixed feelings about the neighborhood. No one could have predicted the gentrification and how that would have impacted the East Village of today, and Peter would certainly have many opinions on that issue. John and I were forced out of our apartment by a developer, but we still go to the old neighborhood: Anthony Aiden Myoptics for our glasses on St. Marks Place, our old block, and we still eat breakfast at Veselka on 9th Street.