,1981)
“Everyone thought he was their best friend,” says Gary Schneider of Peter Hujar. The legendary printer is in conversation with Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, reflecting on the legacy of his close friend and mentor ahead of a new retrospective – Eyes Open in the Dark – the pair have curated at London’s Raven Row alongside the gallery’s director, Alex Sainsbury. Despite being 20 years senior to his contemporaries (Robert Mapplethorpe, Stanley Stellar and Alvin Baltrop), Hujar was a ‘Pied Piper’ of downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s. His images testify to a now-vanished art scene and subcultural milieu, a pre-gentrification East Village filled with artists, poets, Off-Broadway performers, and drag queens.
Backdropped by the sexual revolution of the 60s and the looming financial crisis of the 70s, Millar notes that this enclave of underground artists had a “remarkable sociality”. He recalls that everyone he spoke to for his upcoming biography on the artist (set for release in 2029) told him they would speak to Hujar on the phone for three hours a day. “The dialogue that was happening was remarkable. And the fact that people could afford to be in bars together, that’s how scenes build,” he says. “That’s how ideas circulate. It feels like that is something that, at best, is in peril – and at worst, is already gone.”
Hujar’s portraits of friends, lovers, and sometimes, as Schneider reveals, strangers he met on the street who “turned him on,” are infused with a distinctive intimacy and tactile reciprocity. From toe-sucking and full-frontal orgasms to quiet introspections and arresting eye contact, Hujar’s images are both seductive and cerebral, near-psychoanalytic examinations of his subjects. Millar remembers friend Lynn Davis saying, “Looking at a Hujar portrait is the closest thing to waking up next to someone in bed.”
“It’s that thing of having been revealed, having had that experience of being vulnerable in front of someone, transparent and then waking up,” Millar elaborates. “This may sound hokey, but I think Peter believed in a generative force in all things. Whether it’s a landscape, a dog, a horse or a person, there’s a sense of animism behind [it].”
In Eyes Open in the Dark, Hujar’s sitters include William S Burroughs, Divine, Fran Lebowitz, Cookie Mueller and Susan Sontag. There are also, importantly, many images of Hujar’s close friend and fleeting lover David Wojnarowicz in the exhibition, including their famous shoot from 1981. “Peter works really hard to turn him into an Adonis,” Millar says. “I mean, he looks so beautiful.” Speaking about this series, Schneider remembers, “The image of David resting on his elbow, which I find the most complex of all the portraits and the most difficult to print … each time I see a print, it really is like a new thing for me.” Schneider insists that Hujar “was truly in love with David until the end. That was his perfect person.”
, 1983)
Like Wojnarowicz, Hujar frequented and photographed Manhattan’s Westside Piers, 578 miles of waterfront that became a totem of social and sexual experimentation for the city’s homosexuals. Post-deindustrialisation and pre-redevelopment, the piers became a popular cruising site – a haven where gay men could sunbathe, socialise, and have sex out in the open. “We all enjoyed the piers, but Peter really wanted to understand it,” says Schneider, who would accompany Hujar to shoot there. “Peter was not documenting anything. He really wanted to understand what was happening, the dynamic of a situation … It’s a spiritual investigation.”
There are approximately 130 images in the new exhibition, alongside eight prints that have never been seen before. As co-curators Schneider and Millar had full access to the Peter Hujar Archive, headed by Stephen Koch. Schneider describes the “remarkable pleasure” of working with the archivist, who is constantly “looking at different collections to find new images that we didn’t know were printed because we could only print things that Peter printed.” Millar confirms that these new images “shift the tone of the whole thing. It’s dramatic [and] opens a different vista.” One new image is of performer Richie Gallo backstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973, dressed in nothing but a gimp mask and fishnet body stocking, holding a cigarette. “Oh, it’s so good,” Millar gushes. “Wait till you see that ... talk about sexually charged!” Schneider yells.
Some works in the show capture Hujar as seen by other artists. These include Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964) and Paul Thek’s painting Portrait of Peter Hujar (1963-4). These works are “modalities of desire operating in the room that are outside of Peter’s own gaze,” Millar explains. Schneider remembers that Thek’s painting was made in the full bloom of Thek and Hujar’s romantic relationship, and was stored in Hujar’s loft on 189 Second Avenue, which was also his studio and darkroom. “It’s extraordinary for me to see it because I remember it was always there, totally battered up and covered in cigarette tar.”
, 1973)
Hujar’s premature death in 1987 from Aids-related pneumonia left his work and legacy obscure from contemporary culture and art historical understanding. In recent years, the work of this once-fringe artist has been embraced in ways that would have seemed unimaginable during his lifetime. Hujar published just one book in his lifetime, Portraits of Life and Death (1970), and it barely caused a ripple. Since then, his long-overdue recognition has grown exponentially, with book after book, exhibition upon exhibition, a show at last year’s Venice Biennale, and an upcoming film about a day in the life of the artist, starring Ben Whishaw adapted from Linda Rosenkrantz’s book Peter Hujar’s Day.
Eyes Open in the Dark is a Hujar full-monty. This well-endowed exhibition puts the artist on full display, quite literally leaving very little to the imagination. Schneider and Millar recount going through Hujar’s contact sheets and renaming naked photographs of the artist as self-portraits. Schneider describes the two images of Hujar: “One with a big dildo up his ass,” and another one of him “showing his ass and pissing, from the back”. Both images encapsulate this exhibition; boldly hung, deeply felt and pissing with a charming brilliance.
Eyes Open in the Dark by Peter Hujar is on show at Raven Row in London until 6 April 2025.
