Frieze Masters

Capturing a wide range of offstage postures and moods, Hujar’s images are unified by their penetrating view of transitional moments. At the heart of many of these performers’ acts, and often their personal lives too, was a fluid and radical understanding of gender. In the photographs, this plays out in part through the elaborate garments and makeup they don. Plumes of feathers, crisp white collars, masks, sequins, satin folds, and lustrous eyelash extensions call attention to and celebrate gender expression though dress. Hujar’s treatment of his subjects—sometimes tender, sometimes gregarious, and always straightforward—reveled in the expressive possibilities of costume, staging, and lighting, constructing images that distilled the subversive essence of their context.

All the works included in the presentation are lifetime prints—made by the artist himself. Hujar, who was technically skilled in the darkroom, made multiple prints of the same image to arrive at his desired effect. The contrast between sharp tonalites and the gradations between them were manipulated by the artist to dramatic heights—as much part of the image as the composition and subject. His black-and-white photographs were often centered within the square frame, thus rendering all his subjects with classical dignity. As objects, the works are physical items of exquisite beauty; as images, they bring forth the decades of joy, pain, struggle, and ecstasy of the figures they depict.