Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: while you marvel at your Avedon and your Mapplethorpe, you have missed the essential. Peter Hujar, an American photographer who died of AIDS in 1987, captured something that your darlings of the art market never knew how to grasp. Where Mapplethorpe sculpted bodies in conceptual marble, reducing his subjects to abstract forms and their faces to masks, Hujar embraced the irreducible humanity of each being. His photography was not an act of possession but of mutual revelation, a silent pact forged between the lens and the gaze.
This American photographer of Ukrainian origin, raised by his grandparents on a New Jersey farm before being torn away at thirteen from this relative tranquility to join the hell of a one-room New York apartment with a violent mother, never sought easy recognition. He lived in a loft above the Eden Theater in the East Village, transforming this dilapidated space into a creative sanctuary where everyone passed through. His work remained marginal during his lifetime, but since then, history has done him justice. Major institutions now acquire his works by the hundreds: the Morgan Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate Modern. But this late enthusiasm raises a disturbing question: why did it take us forty years to understand?
The body as a literary text
The relationship between Hujar and literature is no mere biographical coincidence. Susan Sontag, that formidable intellectual who terrorized New York’s cultural scene with her sharp intelligence, entrusted him with the introduction to her only book published during her lifetime, “Portraits in Life and Death” in 1976 [1]. This alliance was no accident. Sontag sought in photography what she explored in her essays: the tension between surface and depth, between representation and truth. Her theories on photography, developed in “On Photography”, found in Hujar a paradoxical embodiment. Where Sontag proclaimed that photography “converts the entire world into a cemetery” [1], Hujar showed that each image could simultaneously be a celebration of life and a meditation on death.
Writers populate his work like figures in a choral novel. William S. Burroughs, that literary junkie who reinvented narration with his cut-ups, poses for Hujar with the same unsettling presence he infused into his texts. Fran Lebowitz, caustic chronicler of 1970s New York, appears in her bed, wrapped in polka-dotted sheets, captured in the intimacy that characterizes autobiographical writing. Vince Aletti, cultural critic, used to stop by Hujar not only to chat but to use his shower [2], a prosaic detail that says everything about the permeability between life and artistic creation. These portraits are not simple documents. They function like visual short stories, each telling a complete story in a single image.
The narrative construction in Hujar’s work borrows from 20th-century literary techniques. His photographic sequences, notably those exhibited at the Gracie Mansion Gallery in 1986, operated like Eisenstein-style montages or modernist collages [3]. A cow ruminating on its straw faces the British actor David Warrilow photographed nude. The portrait of Jackie Curtis dead in his coffin is adjacent to a New Jersey landscape and a drag queen displaying her tattooed thigh. Diana Vreeland, fashion icon, is alongside a close-up of the feet of Australian artist Vali Myers and a Queens landfill. This juxtaposition rejects traditional cultural hierarchy, proposing a visual democracy where every subject deserves the same formal attention.
The influence of the Beat Generation runs through his work. Allen Ginsberg, photographed by Hujar in 1974, refuses to surrender to the camera, grumbling and resisting [2]. This tension between photographer and subject evokes the complex relationship between the writer and his raw material. Hujar sought what Ginsberg sought in “Howl”: a raw, unfiltered truth, sometimes uncomfortable. As one of his models recalls, Hujar demanded “a burning, blinding honesty directed at the lens. No acting. No posing. No pretense.” This ethical demand echoes the literary imperative of sincere testimony.
The writer and activist David Wojnarowicz, who became his lover and then his protégé in 1981, embodies this fusion between literature and photography. Wojnarowicz wrote with the same desperate urgency that Hujar photographed. His texts, raw and political, found their visual equivalent in the images Hujar made of him. The 1981 portrait “David Wojnarowicz with a Snake” captures something indescribable: a wild vulnerability, a menacing tenderness. After Hujar’s death, Wojnarowicz photographed his face, hands, and feet in the hospital room, creating a triptych that functions like an elegiac poem. This reciprocity, this constant exchange between seeing and being seen, between writing and being written, defines Hujar’s practice.
The concept of revelation, central to his approach, has a literary dimension. To reveal, in photography, is the chemical process that makes the latent image appear. To reveal, in literature, is to unveil what was hidden. Hujar operated on both levels simultaneously. His subjects had to reveal themselves psychologically while he technically revealed the image in his darkroom. This double meaning was not metaphorical but literal. He spent hours in his lab manipulating contrasts and gradations, creating prints of stunning formal beauty, those exquisite black-and-white tones that became his signature.
His book “Portraits in Life and Death” functions as a collection of short stories where each image dialogues with the others. Portraits of his friends, Sontag, Lebowitz, Aletti, John Waters, and drag queen Divine, alternate with photographs of corpses from the Palermo catacombs he took in 1963. This narrative structure creates a contemporary memento mori, recalling the literary tradition of meditations on mortality. But where the Baroque vanitas used skulls and hourglasses, Hujar juxtaposes the vitality of his living friends with the macabre elegance of the Sicilian dead.
The choreography of the immobile body
Dance permeates all of Hujar’s work, even when his subjects remain perfectly still. This apparent contradiction reveals his profound understanding of movement as potentiality rather than action. Bruce de Sainte Croix, a dancer whom he photographed nude in 1976, embodies this tension. The three portraits of Sainte Croix form a condensed choreographic sequence: tension, release, ecstasy. In the most famous one, the dancer is seated, eyes lowered, his right hand grasping his erect penis. This image, often described as orgasmic, transcends pornography through its rigorous composition and its deeply honest impact.
Unlike Mapplethorpe, who never showed orgasm or ejaculation in his published photographs, Hujar did not avoid these moments of absolute vulnerability. The “Orgasmic Man” series marks a major structural difference between the two photographers. Where Mapplethorpe sought statuary perfection, Hujar captured the instant when the body escapes all control. This loss of control, this submission to pleasure or pain, constitutes the very essence of modern dance. The dancers Hujar worked with belonged to that post-Cunningham generation that rejected gratuitous virtuosity in favor of bodily authenticity.
His backstage portraits of dancers reveal this liminal moment between the ordinary self and the performative self. Charles Ludlam as Camille, with his neckline revealing a chest of hair under the sequins, synthesizes gender just as contemporary dance synthesizes techniques. This fluidity, this ability to slip between identities, reflects the philosophy of the Judson Dance Theater and the choreographers who revolutionized New York dance in the 1960s. Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton explored everyday movement as choreographic material. Hujar photographed this everyday life with the same attention that a choreographer gives to dissecting an ordinary gesture.
The photographic series “Angels of Light” shows drag dancer-performers after their psychedelic shows, glitter still caught in their beards. This troupe, founded by dissident members of the Cockettes, created total performances where dance, theater, and happenings merged. Hujar did not capture the show itself but its aftermath, that moment of return to reality which paradoxically reveals the truth of the performance. Tired bodies, running makeup, post-show exhaustion: that is the real dance, the one that takes its toll on the body.
Vali Myers, an Australian artist and dancer whose tattooed feet Hujar photographed in close-up, embodied this vision of dance as a bodily inscription. Her tattoos, her scarifications, transformed her body into a living score. Each mark told a movement, a story, a pain overcome. Hujar understood that dance is not limited to visible movement. It persists in muscular memory, in scars, in the way a dancer inhabits his body even at rest.
His male nudes, often contorted, function as choreographic studies. Gary Schneider, the shooter who became a friend and who now prints his works, bends in two, one leg pulled over his bowed head. Daniel Schock leans to suck his toe. These angular and uncomfortable positions are neither sensual nor graceful in the conventional sense. They explore the limits of bodily flexibility, testing what a body can do. This systematic investigation of bodily possibilities belongs to the tradition of experimental dance.
The recurrence of the lying position in his portraits evokes the dancer’s rest, that moment when the horizontal body recovers from vertical effort. Cookie Mueller, immortalized by Nan Goldin and Hujar, stares defiantly at us from her bed. This direct gaze contradicts the passivity of the posture. It is the gaze of a body that knows its power and temporarily chooses rest. Dance does not exist only in movement but in the alternation between tension and relaxation, between activity and rest.
Hujar’s urban landscapes possess their own choreography. The dilapidated stairs of the Canal Street Pier, the docks where men cruised, the ruins of abandoned buildings: these empty spaces bear the traces of past movements. Like a stage after the performance, they keep the imprint of the bodies that crossed them. This attention to post-performance spaces, places haunted by absence, recalls contemporary dance installations that use video and photography to capture the ephemeral.
His fascination with animals is also part of a reflection on natural movement. The cow behind the barbed wire, which he called a self-portrait, has a contemplative grace. The horses he photographed radiate restrained power. The dead seagull, placed by Wojnarowicz for Hujar’s lens in 1985, maintains even in death an airy elegance. These animals teach a choreographic lesson: authentic movement cannot be simulated; it emanates from an inner necessity.
Persistences
Hujar’s work resists the comfortable categories that the art market and the museum institution would like to impose on it. They want to make him the chronicler of a bygone era, the documentarian of a New York engulfed by gentrification and decimated by AIDS. That would be too simple. His photographs do not document; they question. They ask questions about what it means to see and be seen, about the minimal distance needed between oneself and the other for an authentic encounter to occur.
The belated recognition he enjoys today reveals our own blindness and transformation. For forty years, the art world considered Hujar marginal, difficult, too uncommercial. His uncompromising personality, his refusal to flatter the market guaranteed his obscurity [4]. But this marginality was precisely his strength. Free from the compromises imposed by fame, he developed a singular vision, irreducible to the trends of the moment. His photographs resemble nothing else because they never sought to resemble anything.
The triptych that Wojnarowicz created at the bedside of the dying Hujar closes a loop: the photographer becomes photographed, the seer becomes seen. This final reversibility suggests that the whole photographic enterprise of Hujar was less about capturing others than creating the conditions for reciprocity. His subjects looked at him as much as he looked at them. This double attention, this silent pact, explains the particular intensity of his portraits. One does not just look at a portrait by Hujar; one is looked at in return.
Last winter’s exhibition at Raven Row in London, and the numerous retrospectives in recent years at the MAPFRE Foundation in Barcelona [3], the Morgan Library in New York, and the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, testify to a shift in our way of seeing. We are slowly learning what Hujar knew instinctively: that dignity is not conferred by social status but by the formal attention given to each singular existence. His drag queens possess the nobility of Renaissance princes. His dogs have the presence of heraldic lions. His dilapidated urban landscapes rival romantic ruins.
Looking at Hujar today is to measure what we have lost and what persists nevertheless. The New York he photographed no longer exists. Most of the people he portrayed have died. But something remains in these images, a quality of attention and presence that defies time. His photographs teach us that it is possible to look without dominating, to reveal without betraying, to love without possessing. In our era saturated with disposable images, this ethical and aesthetic lesson becomes more urgent than ever.
- Susan Sontag, introduction to Peter Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death, Da Capo Press, New York, 1976
- Linda Rosenkrantz, Peter Hujar’s Day, Magic Hour Press, 2022
- Joel Smith, Peter Hujar, Speed of Life, Fundación Mapfre and Aperture, 2017
- Vince Aletti, text of the catalog Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown, Pace/MacGill Gallery and Steidl, 2016
