Peter Hujar

The exhibition, which includes more than 30 works spanning 1966 to 1985, is organized around two distinct modes of Hujar’s practice: images that he made of friends, lovers, and acquaintances who posed for him inside his loft on 12th Street in New York’s East Village and photographs that he took while cruising the dilapidated Christopher Street piers on Manhattan’s far West Side. These urban ruins are sometimes populated by strangers engaged in acts of public intimacy, while at other times absent of anyone at all, save the traces of previous habitation. In addition, the exhibition includes several photographs that Hujar took in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo in 1963 on a trip taken with his boyfriend at that time, the artist Paul Thek. The full suite of these images was included in the only book that Hujar published during his lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death, accompanied by an introduction penned by his friend, the writer Susan Sontag.

The smooth contours that feature in Hujar’s studio images of mostly nude bodies contrast with the peeling paint and dilapidated surfaces in his photographs of the Manhattan’s piers. During the 1970s, the piers were a quasi-utopian space on the margins of the city where gay men were able to seek each other out—a “cruising utopia,” in the words of theorist José Esteban Muñoz, outside the prejudicial gaze of mainstream culture. Queer intimacy flourished in these marginal spaces during the heyday of the gay liberation movement that followed the Stonewall rebellion of 1968 and preceded the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s. Hujar’s images of these urban ruins, their surfaces encrusted with traces of life, are never detached documents; like his portraits, they involve themselves in the lives of those who gathered there. Like his contemporaries Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar worked at what Joel Smith has described as the “crossroads of brutality of beauty,” and yet his images have an uncanny intimacy that distinguishes them from those of his peers. Hujar’s pictures are always part and parcel of the world of their subjects.

Although Hujar is best known for his portraits of New York’s cultural elite, including drag performers, artists, musicians, writers, and dancers who made up his expansive milieu—and who defined New York’s artistic, bohemian, and queer communities in the post-1960s era—the studio images in this exhibition emphasize a different side of his photographic vision. The exhibition features works that highlight how Hujar approached the body—in particular, the male nude—through a rigorous formalism, simultaneously celebrating and denaturing the classical ideal.

The works in the exhibition testify to Hujar’s commitment to photography as more than an aesthetic medium. In his hands, the camera was simultaneously a tool for philosophical inquiry, an amplifier of erotic cathexis, and a technique of liberation. In Hujar’s project, expression becomes resistance. His photographs reconfigure corporeality in ways that disrupt our assumptions about what bodies are for and what they can do. They ask us: What is a body? When do we become our bodies? When do our bodies become us? How do we inhabit the world as bodies, and how does the world inhabit us?