“When people talk about me, I want them to be whispering.”
Andy Warhol once described Peter Hujar as “the boy that never blinked.” He said this after filming Hujar four times for his Screen Tests. Hujar had sat with impeccable stillness, as if he were posing for a photograph. Warhol’s stray remark happens to illuminate Hujar’s approach to photography. His talent was in waiting, unblinking, for a sitter’s inner self to come forth. He was patient, coaxing the people he photographed to shed the mask they presented to the world, pressing the shutter when that mask slipped. While Hujar’s photographs are now renowned, during his lifetime his work went largely unnoticed outside the Downtown New York City art scene he was a part of. As a habitual saboteur of his own career, Hujar accurately predicted he’d be better known after his death.
At his funeral, in 1987, his friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said that Hujar “has hung up [the phone] on every important photography dealer in the Western world.” By the time he died, at age 53, from AIDS-related complications, Hujar had published a single book (Portraits in Life and Death, 1976) and an exhibition catalogue. This was not because of a lack of material. Instead it was a position—a posture—he cultivated. He wanted to be one of “the real ones”—Hujar’s term for artists who eschewed fame and money to pursue artistic integrity outside of the mainstream. He was committed to the images he wanted to make, all else be damned.
Born in 1934, Hujar was raised on a farm in New Jersey. His father absconded and was always unknown to him, while his mother was neglectful. She left Hujar to be raised by his Ukrainian grandparents, and he spent the first five years of his life only speaking Ukrainian. Despite having movie-star good looks from adolescence, his mother undermined his confidence, repeatedly and publicly declaring him ugly. After living with her in his early teens in an apartment on East 32nd Street, Hujar left and never returned the night his mother threw a beer bottle at his head. All of this would contribute to his position as an aloof character, an observer photographing from the edge.
For the most part, Hujar, primarily taking photographs in his loft on Second Avenue in the East Village, created pictures of people, animals, objects, or landscapes known to him. “My work comes out of my life,” he said. “The people I photograph are not freaks or curiosities to me. I like people who dare.” Hujar loomed large in the underground Downtown New York art scene in the 1970s and ’80s—a time when overt queer representation, identity politics, and punk sensibilities blossomed in the East Village. “In many ways Peter Hujar defined Downtown for me,” recalled his friend, the writer Vince Aletti. “He understood its rhythms, nuances, pleasures, and pitfalls. He went to places I never dared to, and hung out with people I only read about.”
Hujar was also an inspiration for many younger artists, including multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz (with whom, after a brief sexual relationship, he formed an intense bond) and photographer Nan Goldin. Both looked to Hujar as an example of an artist who maintained integrity within an increasingly commercialized art world. He was two decades their senior, giving gravity to his advice—Wojnarowicz in particular took to heart Hujar’s lesson never to compromise in his artmaking.
For 15 years, beginning in 1953, Hujar honed his skills as a commercial photographer for fashion magazines, a job he loathed but which gave him access to a darkroom and studio after work hours. In 1963, along with his intermittent boyfriend, the artist Paul Thek, Hujar traveled to Sicily, where he took photographs of skeletons in the catacombs of Palermo. These images were featured in Portraits in Life and Death, paired with portraits of friends and figures from his scene.
One of Hujar’s most reproduced works is Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1973), a portrait of the transgender performer who was one of Andy Warhol’s Superstars. At first glance it isn’t obvious that Darling is in a hospital bed—her pose is evocative of the archetypal Hollywood femme fatale, an image Darling so coveted—and the rich blacks, whites, and grays Hujar achieved in his darkroom add to the image’s drama. Though Darling was only six months from death, Hujar manages to capture her unwavering glamor and seductiveness.
Hujar once said, “I make uncomplicated direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects.” The writer Stephen Koch, a close friend of Hujar’s and the executor of his estate, added that Hujar’s portraits “could be graceful or awkward, pleasing or mortifying, candid or posed. It just had to be real, and it had to be beautiful…. Your portrait was always unmistakably you, but only because it was also unmistakably his.” Hujar’s images are unfetishized depictions of complex people living outside of mainstream culture. “I photograph those who push themselves to any extreme,” Hujar declared, “and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves.”
George Benson, Assistant Educator, Interpretation, Research, and Digital Learning, Department of Learning and Engagement, 2024
Note: opening quote is from Carr, C., Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury USA, 2012).
