Peter Hujar’s Photos Are All the Rage. He’d Be Shocked.
The earliest photograph Peter Hujar printed for exhibition was a 1955 portrait of his beloved English teacher Daisy Aldan. “One of my aims,” Aldan once said, “is to encourage and teach people to work with imagination through the living hand, because there is something pretty wonderful that emanates from the work that the living hand has touched.”
Hujar’s pictures still feel handmade, and alive. Known for his atmospheric and often erotic portraiture, he always floated just outside the mainstream—until, perhaps, now, nearly 40 years after his death. One of his photos (of a man who appears to be crying but is in fact having an orgasm) adorns the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s wildly successful 2015 novel, A Little Life. A couple of upcoming exhibitions, including one at the Morgan Library, in New York City, will soon bring even more attention to his work. Last year, a book by Hujar’s friend Linda Rosenkrantz was adapted into a critically acclaimed film, Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall; a photo book, Paul Thek & Peter Hujar: Stay Away From Nothing, covered the relationship between Hujar and his lover and collaborator, the painter and installation artist Paul Thek.
Hujar and Thek might have been surprised by their new visibility. (They died in the late 1980s of AIDS-related complications.) Even as they cultivated famous friends in the New York art scene of the ’60s and ’70s, both retained an aura of mystery and niche appeal. Hujar photographed queer royalty, including Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Gary Indiana, Greer Lankton, and Jackie Curtis. He and Thek were early visitors to Andy Warhol’s Factory and appear in his famous screen tests. “Andy offered me everything,” Hujar once wrote—including a pathway to success. And yet, the couple resisted these overtures, avoiding the self-promotion that characterized so many in their circle as if it were the plague.
A new dual biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was, by Andrew Durbin, a novelist and the editor in chief of Frieze magazine, reveals just how much of the mystery surrounding their work—and its sense of impermanence—was by design.
When Thek and Hujar met, they were both engaged in their first serious romances with other men. As Durbin writes, Thek “first strolls into view,” and into Peter’s life, in one of Hujar’s photographs. In the pictures of the day they met, and in others from their early acquaintance published in Stay Away From Nothing, both are achingly young—it’s clear why Durbin refers to them as “the boys.”
Both had emerged from rough childhoods. Hujar’s mother abandoned him to the care of his grandparents. Luckily, their home was a haven on a bucolic farm, later the subject of some of his most striking work. Reflecting on one of his photographs of a horse, Hujar’s friend Ann Wilson once wrote in her diary, “This horse has a sort of pride of isolation, a spirit of this place. The horse has the most rooted presence, as if it will never leave this stark hill.” When Hujar was 11, his mother came to retrieve him, and he moved back into an abusive and turbulent home with her second husband in a small apartment in Manhattan. For the rest of his life, he would introduce her to others only by her first and last name.
[Read: A Little Life: The great gay novel might be here]
Thek came from a Catholic family; many of his female relatives became nuns, though his upbringing was “not especially religious.” His mother was detached, alcoholic, and given to “writing melancholy poems” at the kitchen table. At school, he was teased relentlessly as a “sissy,” and he described his first sexual experience as “torture.” His birth name was George Joseph Thek, but he later chose a new first name, representing a new beginning. As he wrote to his boyfriend at the time of the change, “You would have to be me to know why I am Paul after all.” He went on to explain, “It is important that everything in the world be clean and painted white.”
In selecting anecdotes from the artists’ childhoods, Durbin reveals an interest in the ecstatic moment of art-making. Thek’s father helped him plant carrot seeds in the backyard when he was a boy. “The next day, Paul found fresh, fully grown carrots sticking out of the ground,” Durbin writes. “His father convinced him he had a miraculous touch.” Hujar had a dream at 8 or 9, which he told Wilson about as he was dying. In it, he “saw a unicorn stagger forth among the trees. His memory of the animal was vivid; it had really happened, he believed,” Durbin writes. “In legend, the unicorn’s touch can heal even the most severe illness.”
Art, for both of them, was magical and evanescent. Thek loved “sand mandalas, which Buddhist monks sweep away once they are completed,” Durbin writes. “The inevitable destruction of a work of art intrigued him for its poignancy.” Documentation of his work survives only in photographs taken by Hujar or casual bystanders. When a gallery in Europe told Thek that he would need to have his work shipped back to the United States and he could not afford the shipment fees, they simply trashed it. While Thek was in Europe, he learned that he was being evicted from his apartment, where his entire archive of notebooks and artworks were stored. Because he had no way to secure his belongings, the landlord simply threw everything out with the garbage. But Thek’s reaction was relief. He wrote to Hujar, “You’ve no idea how liberating it is.”
In light of this impermanence, Durbin’s careful analysis, especially of Thek’s work, is essential. La Corazza di Michelangelo, a sculpture of a disembodied (or disembowled) Roman torso, “began with a small plaster replica of a Roman breastplate Paul picked up” in Sicily. He applied wax and then painted it. Durbin describes it as resembling “the pulverized remains of some fallen soldier, his body rotting in the sun.” Thek told his gallerist that the theme of the work was “the uselessness of defense”—“possibly evoking,” Durbin offers, “the gospel of Matthew in which Christ famously counsels his disciples in nonresistance.” Durbin references an essay by the artist Mike Kelley, who proposes that the pacifism in Thek’s work, especially during the war in Vietnam, hampered his artistic career because it represented an “unassimilable anti-Americanism”—which “couldn’t be hawked at the market.”
Hujar’s archive, however, is robust. His contact sheets—a total of 5,783—are housed at the Morgan Library (more than 110 of them will be on display for its exhibit “Hujar:Contact,” which opens on May 22). When he lived, however, these were not treated as treasured objects. Durbin familiarizes us with the mores of the ’60s and ’70s, when photography was simply not thought of as a form of high art. As he makes clear, “Almost no galleries bothered showing or selling photographs.”
[Read: Warhol’s bleak prophecy]
To make a living, Hujar worked for other photographers in studios that were focused on commercial or fashion photography. There, he honed his skills. “What happened in the darkroom was just as important as what happened in a session,” Durbin explains to the contemporary reader, who may not be familiar with the arduous, tactile labor that once went into every print. “In the darkroom, Peter tweaked an image in ways that are almost painterly.” Gary Schneider, a South African–born photographer and a friend of Hujar’s, once wrote: “Even though Peter made iconic images that we can easily recognize, he wasn’t interested in making the full reading of the image easy. He worked very hard to control the speed at which the image reveals itself.”
Almost no work from either Hujar or Thek was sold during their lifetime. “Editors were often baffled,” Durbin writes of Hujar’s photography. “His images could seem aloof, cold, confusing; some were even upsetting.” Both artists rejected the trendy “pop art” aesthetic, which played on ideas about reproduction and consumerism even as it partook in both. “Compared with Warhol, Peter’s own approach to photography was ‘Victorian,’ a slow, methodical process that required much more than simply snapping a pic,” Durbin writes. Thek’s art, meanwhile, had an almost religious tone, an aspect that “certainly didn’t help sales.” Both artists were struggling—especially Thek, who, without a regular job, relied on charity from friends and his parents. One of Hujar’s boyfriends, the anti-war activist Jim Fouratt, “thought Peter was afraid of success,” Durbin relays.
Hujar and Thek were anxious about the costs of respectability. Art-making in the modern era is about selling something, but it’s also about control. Agents, gallerists, curators, buyers, and even fans can take some of that control away. Hujar aggressively resisted labels: “I don’t want to be remembered as a gay photographer,” he told friends. And neither artist was particularly interested in gay liberation. Durbin writes of Hujar’s concern that if queer life became mainstream, “cruising might lose its mystique!”
As Hujar attained some success, the relationship became strained; it, too, would not last. Hujar exhibited and published his only book, Portraits in Life and Death, in 1976. Sontag wrote the introduction from her hospital bed, while undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Thek was one of the last people to sit for the book, in August 1975; he did so reluctantly. After a second sitting, he wrote Hujar what would be his final letter to him. Before he signed off, he wrote, “Any time you want to make love, just ask me.” They never spoke again.
Death comes abruptly and horribly in the book—and this is very much by Durbin’s design. His biography effectively ends with the couple’s breakup, and their diagnoses and deaths a decade later are relegated to the epilogue—a brief 10 pages of a roughly 400-page biography. When Hujar received a letter from his doctor confirming that he had AIDS, Durbin writes, “he stopped taking pictures. He allowed the processing chemicals in the darkroom of his loft to evaporate and crystallize.” Far from turning to thoughts of his legacy, he let the work go.
[Read: The photographer who captured 20th-century queer life]
Durbin makes clear from the very beginning of the book that he is not interested in reading Thek’s and Hujar’s lives through their deaths. For many reasons, it can be tempting to do so, especially in light of how ephemeral their work felt when they lived. Such an approach can be elevating; it can also be a way of negotiating genius, which is terrifying (and rare) to truly encounter. But a biographer who writes from the vantage point of the grave is a lazy one. The Wonderful World That Almost Was wholeheartedly resists this reading, and by doing so, it not only gives Thek and Hujar back their lives; it gives its readers a new perspective on work that is both effervescent and rigorous.
Durbin is drawn not to the last days of these artists but to the very start of their connection—the moment their eyes locked in mutual recognition. He brings a novelist’s touch when imagining how Hujar and Thek became a couple. “Probably there was a multitude of sparks,” he writes, “half hidden from everyone but them: the look in Peter’s eyes when he saw Paul at a bar on Washington Square, the way Paul minded whether Peter laughed at his jokes, how Peter squeezed close when there was plenty of room on the couch.” This is how Durbin commemorates them—in magical, fleeting moments, in the touch of living hands.