Peter Hujar’s Search for Secrets

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’s 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, “He had disdain for the whole process of selling himself. Fran Lebowitz pointed out that ‘he also had a profound distrust of authority, and that he couldn’t make a distinction between someone who owned some little photography gallery, and the Pope.’ ” To get the check, you have to kiss the ring, and Hujar couldn’t. So he lived as he lived. He was “the poorest grown-up I have been personally close to in my life,” his executor, the writer Stephen Koch, once said.

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’s childhood home in New Jersey; of the artist Brigid Berlin for New Times 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the world they came from, one where you wouldn’t blink an eye at a topless woman winking at you; by then, flirting had been replaced by the art of the put-on.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’s images, this formidable woman is drained of esprit; what remains is the mask. Fame does not console. Vreeland’s isolation is Rose Murphy’s isolation and her son’s as well. And it’s a godless place.

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’s 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—even 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’s home, but you can’t 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—too much California hippie love and drift for the professional-minded New York audience—and looking, too, at all those smiling, committed, excited people with the Gay Liberation Front, seeming to rush toward Hujar’s 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’s hope, evidence of the dreams that he, she, or they didn’t even know they were having. ♦