Like a vow, a shine, an opportunity, or a breath, {a photograph} is one thing taken. This taking suggests a transgression that results some type of transformation, that destines an infidelity. But in Peter Hujar’s vitalized portraits—coarsened and creamed, dusted and darkened—there’s far much less taking than giving. This giving arose from Hujar’s persistence, noticing the shared introspection of every topic’s bringing into being of themselves. Difficulties are detours, discoveries, in an individual’s attentiveness to oneself, and therein one finds. One finds that to be oneself takes a lifetime. In between, an exhale, {a photograph}, rendering and releasing the portrait as a slipped, unbuttoned pact. Arresting as a result of unloosing, Hujar mentioned: “It’s an honesty factor.”1
These honesties at the moment are effectively historicized. Eyes Open within the Darkish at Raven Row, London, sympathetically curated by the artist’s biographer John Douglas Millar and Hujar’s shut pal and printer Gary Schneider, attests to those intricate dignities and their irrepressible gravity. Surveying works primarily from the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, the present largely represents Hujar’s last decade. What emerges is an attentiveness to topics being impossibly themselves, and the intimacy solid to result in such presence—one thing of a Hujar thematic so particularized and individuated, it practically evades definition. Each “I” defies. As Roland Barthes requested, “I unfold myself round: my complete little universe in crumbs; on the middle, what?”2. Squarely, Hujar may need answered: you.
Once more, Barthes unravels: “So many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures.”3 So many beginnings arrive and arrive in Hujar’s little universe, wherein he stays the middle amongst strobic suddenness. Or so the images greet us within the opening rooms: as linear apposition of syntactical sequence; as modernist grid; as carefully hung vertical pairs.4 Encountered one after the other at a measured tempo, their episodic placement enacts the fragment as its personal sincere shard, set aside, but by no means with out its attachments. Holding that the “adverse has an edge,” Hujar’s intermittent preservation of the black body contributes to this rhythmed geometry of iconologies: people, animals, ruins, architectures. The truth is, the formalist austerity of his work appears an try and mitigate the fragmentary type of the self—or to confess that fragments are types of life: essentially scattered, uncertain and provisional. Isolate, indefinite, intervallic, Hujar’s dialectic of liquidity and meeting finds wholeness in a fragmented and fluid serenity of arrest.
The metallized mounds of Metal Ruins #7 (1978) are grassy infinities of curls, a retinal hoard of loss of life confetti wherein Hujar finds a wafer of sunshine. Centered inside a three-by-seven grid, the stray light-form turns into an unlikely infinity level. Hint the fats, surgent vein because it sinuates the calf of Paul Hudson (Leg) (1979), throbbing out into the undulant fundament of a foot. A recumbent Discarded Rug (1976) is glamoured by dappled daylight, its heavy folds a mellow abstraction of smoothened suspense. Useless Cat, Pennsylvania (1969) is a cosmology of decay, its carcass declining right into a graveled firmament. Conspiracies of inside and exterior magnetics breed a visible haptics of minor magnitude. Exposing interiorities from interiorities, the catis an artifact of have an effect on, an essay in extensity. Maybe Hujar’s most sturdy fragment is the one implied by the briny corpse of Useless Gull (1985). Wedged upright within the sand, its wings recall Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor research Wing of a European Curler (1512)—a disembodied attraction that migrated all through Hujar’s life, to lastly relaxation as an engraving within the black granite of his headstone.
After his AIDS prognosis in January 1987, Hujar by no means returned to his darkroom. When he died in November of that 12 months from pneumonia associated to the illness, aged fifty-three, his favored gelatin silver paper additionally ceased manufacturing, dying with him.5 Ever since, Schneider’s posthumous prints have transpired cautious invocations and descriptions, extending the sensory expertise in each {photograph} as a newly touched turning into, acts of affection incarnate. Hujar’s fluent proficiency within the darkroom created spectrums of black-and-white tonalities so expansive they conjure a nocturne holography. Tenuities of sunshine suffuse skins in a neorealist cinematics of temperate, auroral glows, whereas nuanced blacks transmute chiaroscuro into an embodied balm: oily, velvety, feathery. This, coupled together with his most well-liked Rolleiflex—which requires wanting away from the topic—deepened his slowed pictures of a touching and touchable world. It vivifies element within the rubbered gristle of a dildo; within the viscid gloss of a heel; within the pert nugget of a nipple; within the chalky diacritics of scars; within the shivered glissando of piss. It locates and loses us within the molting interstice of Hallway, Canal Avenue Pier (1983), the place a skinny stream of daylight fractures the already-simmering disintegration, its pathway of shattered glass, sloughed plaster, and amassed mud softened by cruising’s tread. The cumbersome particles of Canal Avenue Pier, New York (Stairs) (1983) leads the attention up a gaping stairway to nowhere. Potential has met its restrict—or, extra optimistically, is preserved in darkness past attain. Surfacing its textures of tenderness, aliveness, and aloneness on the extent of gelatin silver ashes, this materiality burgeons registration in addition to a way of doubt or relativity as to what’s being seen. Can a cow be that uncanny?
*
“A curtain blows within the wind and this might mark the within or the surface, however neither is fastened, they’re collectively in a scenario the place they produce one another. The road is drawn and the road adjustments.”6
Beholder and beheld are collectively in a scenario, a breeze or a sigh compelling their mutual manufacturing. Marked by radical capacities of sheer consideration, Hujar’s portraits materialize an ethics that doesn’t coax vulnerability however as an alternative surfaces the formation of belief. Stripped of puncta, the faces of people and animals emerge with unfaltering sobriety. They merely are, and with an is-nessso actual it breaks into the opaque. Listed below are intimate research of Victorian sensibility à la Julia Margaret Cameron, suffusing a consciousness of life the place all manners of social contact and reflexivity are poised as if a pure phenomenon. A collapsed shack in a New Jersey evening, its white paint flaking, tapers right into a lounging William S. Burroughs, an beautiful mirroring. A frilled amulet is Jackie Curtis’s breast-pocketed chrysanthemum (Jackie Curtis, Funeral [1985]), rebounding in rippled oases of petaled and quilted whites. Rebounding, too, within the scalloped down of White Turkey, Pennsylvania (1985), the place each feather is a fan, its parted beak and awestruck eye a witness, maybe, to some small miracle. One thinks of Gary Indiana Veiled (1981), his face diaphanously wrapped in astral asphyxiation, a sidereal starlet. Eyeing the heavens, there’s Greer Lankton (1983), a supine and stretching quicksilver creature. It’s not simply the wetted chip in Ethyl Eichelberger’s iris, lit like socketed quartz, however the haloed slope of his eyelashes. Chin in hand, the sunshine catches on every strand of hair and carves muscular shadows. His face a deliquescent structure of satin, water, pores and skin: a wave of shine. Equally, in Clarissa Dalrymple’s Canine, Kirsten (1984), consideration is motioned in a swerve: from the murky blur of the canine’s coat, focus winnows to the virtually dolorous orb of her proper eye. We’re, fairly actually, moved to the very density of element the place consideration is held. Each look, as soon as provided, is a quotation of staged consent the place relationality occurs within the area of encounter, Hujar’s giving of pictures enacting an ethical gesture whereby attentiveness turns into an ethics. As Harrison Adams writes, Hujar “provides consent pictorial type,” that’s, “to make the viewer celebration to and a part of that have by way of the impact of attentiveness.”7 It’s a type that arrives by way of a Bergsonian freedom as period, freedom as timelessness, freedom as suspense, whereby two individuals, in a scenario, see one another.
Description produces pleasure that’s “granular, sluggish, compressed, attentive, appreciative”—a physicalized language that absolutely describes Hujar’s pictures.8 Description can go close to and much, stun and stretch, defamiliarizing and increasing sensory expertise. Sight traces interpenetrate throughout the linked eighteenth-century rooms upstairs, pulling intimate focus to the relationships between Hujar, Paul Thek, and David Wojnarowicz. Vectors of psychic vitality are the subliminal power in a 1973 portrait of a tempestuous Thek. Uncovered to the weather, he exceeds the body that locations him off-center, his face straining and hand hovering inside a second of galvanic expression. Then, leaning in opposition to the mirror above a mantlepiece is a nymphean Thek from 1957, reposed on a mattress of pine needles; in rearview reflection we glimpse Hujar’s nude self-portraits. Then once more, there’s Wojnarowicz’s triptych of Hujar’s loss of life: “Portraits of his superb toes, his head, that open eye once more—I saved attempting to get the sunshine I noticed in that eye.”9
*
“Urge and urge and urge, / All the time the procreant urge of the world.”10
“Jerking off / I cancelled actuality / a) Describe / b) Disappear”11
Hope is an absented cumshot . . . or so I consider Bruce de Sainte Croix’s(1976) self-love, his torso tightened in a rigor of enjoyment over his dick. Earlier than that, quantity drops and edges soften: you comply with his foot and traverse his leg. A while later you attain a thinly leaked mild, coiled round his glans, mirrored upward to a face moistened in swimming pools and bands, his dimpled chin, his cupid’s bow, the ridge of his nostril. Interiority inside interiority: “I’m sitting within a type of second of revelation,” Croix mirrored. It’s a “quiet ecstasy the place one merely sighs in understanding.”12 Capsuled ecstasy, like marble, has its sturdiness. As an introspective communion on decelerated show, masturbation performs a carnal animism. As with Daniel Schock’s (1981) contortive urge to suck his huge toe, these are usually not autoeroticisms however autopoieses, detached and conscious, displaying with spartan brilliance the blinding actual, as Hujar as soon as put it: “The sight of bare flesh for me is sort of a bodily blow.”
The water bruises, absorbing the blows. New York’s Hudson and East Rivers in Hujar’s eight pictures, a part of a concentrated show of labor from 1976 on the higher flooring, are horizon-less witnesses. Every is an immersion into limitless variations. The rivers are gelatinous sheets of obsidian. Rested reflections are finely layered chiffons, faint geodes of their method. The rivers are petroleum dunes, salted by raindrops. A psychic meteorology, the rivers are transcendent portraits of a metropolis and an individual, in items.
*
Being indicators of life, the images on view carry presences of impermanence, limitation, fatality, and grief. To satisfy Hujar’s consideration, there was a purposeful withholding of biographical and contextual data on this textual content, for we all know what can have been. We all know that the work contends with consciousness of the tragedies of unlived futures, that it redoubles the already patent empathy and pathos, that each caress carries its edge. To see these works as precursive contexts delimits their capability and attain, condemning them to Susan Sontag’s misfire that pictures “converts the entire world right into a cemetery.”13 Slightly, as Adrian Rifkin writes: “Hujar’s singularities differentiate states of existence in a method that makes a social or cultural historical past appear at greatest redundant, and at worst parasitic.”14 Scarcely talking on his work, Hujar saved the powder of its poetics dry. Resisting the stifling museological impulses to chronologize or thematize these pictures, a lot much less to sentimentalize their periodization, Eyes Open within the Darkish permits a studying of his creative language. We grasp his attentional ethics as a reciprocative vitality, and his sighting of magnificence as a survival technique, earlier than and past the images’ premature evolution as memorials for an epidemic that also begins.15
“Solitude. The place does its worth lie? For in solitude we’re within the presence of mere matter. . . . If we could possibly be attentive to the identical diploma within the presence of a human being.”16
Hujar meets Simone Weil’s ellipsis and fulfils her modal verb. “Consideration is certain up with want,” she writes, “not with the need however with want—or extra precisely, consent.”17 Types of prayer, types of love, Hujar’s paid consideration was certainly “empty, ready, not looking for something, however able to obtain in its bare reality the thing that’s to penetrate it.”18Eyes open in the dead of night, it’s the gravity and charm of Hujar edging loss of life but holding: “America is such a wonderful nation—don’t you assume so?19
at Raven Row, London
till April 6, 2025
Peter Hujar (1934–1987) photographed his topics with penetrating sensitivity and psychological depth. He captured intellectuals, luminaries, and members of New York’s subcultures in moments of disarmed vulnerability. Hujar embraced male sexuality unabashedly and was unafraid to look at loss of life and dying. In her introduction to Portraits in Life and Loss of life, Susan Sontag wrote, “Fleshed and moist-eyed buddies and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, principally lie—and are made to look to meditate on their very own mortality. . . . Peter Hujar is aware of that portraits in life are at all times, additionally, portraits in loss of life.” Hujar was on the forefront of the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers in downtown New York within the Seventies and early Nineteen Eighties. He succumbed to AIDS in 1987, abandoning a fancy and profound physique of labor that has turn out to be posthumously celebrated. Hujar’s pictures have been exhibited all through Europe and the US, together with on the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the Gray Artwork Museum, New York College; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; PS1 Modern Artwork Middle, Lengthy Island Metropolis, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam for a retrospective in 1994. Exhibited and arranged by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid beginning in 2017, the exhibition Pace of Life made its last cease on the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2019. In 2021, Hujar’s work was topic of a solo exhibition on the FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp, Belgium. In 2024, as a part of the Collateral Occasion of the sixtieth Worldwide Artwork Exhibition on the Venice Biennale, the Peter Hujar Basis organized Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Loss of life on the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà. Hujar’s work is within the everlasting collections of the Artwork Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York; the Museum of Trendy Artwork, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Trendy Artwork; and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York, amongst many different establishments.
Alex Bennett is a author and critic based mostly in London. He's a contributing editor for Flash Artwork.
