There is a photograph installed near the end of Peter Hujar: Rialto at New York’s Ukrainian Museum that still holds my attention. It is a photograph imbued with a sense of quietude that informs so much of Hujar’s work. A hill slowly sweeps toward an uncertain sky covered with a swath of graying clouds. Hovering near the center of this seemingly empty landscape is a small interruption in the warp and waft of the grass, an almost imperceptible cow grazing alone halfway up the hill. Despite its size (or perhaps because of it), the animal calls for deeper contemplation: What of its ambiguous relation to an unseen herd? How do we understand our own various solitudes? Hillside with Cow (1969) is one of the many images on view that requires a lingering consideration of the subtler graces of Hujar’s eye.
Rialto, skillfully curated by the museum’s director Peter Doroshenko, is composed mostly of the photographer’s early work from 1955 to 1969, proffering so many unexpected pleasures, from images rarely seen to some more recognizable. It is an illuminating introduction to the artist’s abundant oeuvre that tracks how Hujar’s point of view developed during these years by exploring a range of themes and genres.
A smattering of the well-known portraits from throughout his career depicting friends, lovers, and artists, including Susan Sontag, Janis Joplin, and Paul Thek, are balanced by the less familiar earlier work, particularly three series—of Southbury, Connecticut; Florence; and the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. This rush of differentiation affords the exhibition a palpable sense of discovery—from the weightless wonder of Girl on Swing, Southbury (1957) or the celestial light pouring from the window onto the young figures in Two Girls Praying, Florence (1958), to Palermo Catacombs #10 (Girl with Flowers) (1963), featuring remains festooned with desiccated flowers and finery that’s uncannily reminiscent of some of Jack Smith’s early fanciful tableaux. As Hujar roves from landscape to street photography, documentary shots to carefully figured studio compositions, the exhibition charts the photographer from student (a charming triptych of nude self-portraits done for a master class instructed by Richard Avedon is a highlight) to established artist with rare attention and sensitivity for human and animal life.
Hujar grew up speaking exclusively in Ukrainian in his immigrant grandmother’s New Jersey home, amid what the exhibition text refers to as a “difficult and unstable upbringing” that “influenced his artistry and vision significantly.” This domestic atmosphere, along with his queerness, prompted writer and executor of Hujar’s estate Stephen Koch to consider the artist a “born member of the underground.” This kind of isolation forged a singular sympathy for the overlooked and the vulnerable evident in his work. He possessed such a close and discerning eye for the finely nuanced matter of lived experience—the ruminative glance, the matter-of-fact pose, the unstaged moment—that allowed him, as a photographer friend who visited the exhibition with me said, to endow even street photography with the arresting compositional complexities of a Dutch still life. At the same time, Hujar’s photos also possess a durational quality, a feeling of ongoingness, as if life is not entombed in just one moment but carries on beyond the shot. This skill is evident throughout the exhibition, whether Hujar was capturing unamused expressions of the waiting queens in Drag Ball, Hotel Diplomat (1968), the wariness of a young girl among the trees in Girl in Bronx Park (1956), or, in Young Self-Portrait (IV) (1958), self-consciously fanning his fingers around a cigarette while squinting at the camera, as if scrutinizing a future held in the distance.
Peter Hujar, Drag Ball, Hotel Diplomat (1), 1968. Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York. © The Peter Hujar Archive – Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Still, I return to that lonely landscape and its lonelier cow punctuating the hill with its solitary presence. I imagine my younger self, having just read Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida as an undergrad, studying the picture, and declaring the cow the photograph’s punctum. Barthes used this term to define the accidental, subjectivity-pricking detail that signals the medium’s allure to hold that which was once there but is no longer. He wrote this book after finding a photograph of his mother as a child while still in the throes of mourning her death. This encounter, he writes, prompts him “to explore [photography] not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.” Photography’s painful quality emerges from the tension between the instant and infinity; the image that remains long after the moment—and its subjects—have departed.
Since its inception, the medium has been imbricated with death and mortality. From Victorian postmortem portraits of loved ones, especially young children, to the haunted reflections of Eugène Atget’s Parisian storefronts and the frenzy for spirit photography, the chemical process of photography embalms time like a corpse. This morbid fascination persists in many foundational texts seeking to theorize the form. Barthes is not alone. In the foreword to Hujar’s seminal 1976 book Portraits in Life and Death, Sontag, a friend and frequent sitter, wrote that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” While most of the works in this exhibition predate the AIDS epidemic, given Hujar’s own death to AIDS-related complications (as well as many of his subjects), biography has made mortality one lens through which to view his work. However, this monolithic understanding forsakes the life he also celebrated through his art.
Peter Hujar, Palermo Catacombs #1, 1963. Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York. © The Peter Hujar Archive – Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Rialto rebuts this habitual impulse to read his images, and in a sense, the medium generally, via an overdetermined and internalized death drive by exhibiting how Hujar’s oeuvre sustains a sense of momentum and liveliness. In Nude Self-Portrait Series #2 (Avedon Master Class) (1967), he runs across the studio, while in Cat on a Cash Register (1957), the feline subject squatting on the liquor-store cash register is frozen in the split second before it assumedly pounces on the camera. Both reflect the artist as an embodied participant and observer of life, moving and interacting with the world around him. This sense of vitality, in all its vicissitudes, is embedded in the very structure of his compositions. I think of that lonely cow. Its grim position within the world—perhaps grazing in a solitary hour before its slaughter—seemingly aligns itself with such a perspective; however, Hujar activates the stillness with life. He frames the shot so that viewers’ eyes must dart across the surface of the photo looking for the farm animal in the title among the camouflaging textures of grass. In this way, Hujar insists the viewer search out life. The impulse to chase life is there even in the series of Catacombs images, for we are not drawn in by the thrall of death but by the life that still, improbably, lingers.
In Girl on the Swing, Southbury, Hujar catches his subject from below, her face grimacing directly at the intrusive photographer and viewer. Her legs are bent, her elbows grasp the chains at sharp angles, and the seat of her pants dips slightly below the swing. Enmeshed in the crosshairs of the diagonal and horizontal lines created by the swing set, the girl is set in tension against earthly forces. The delicate, dynamic geometries of this composition—a sine curve of bent legs, sagging seat, and diagonal chains—is reminiscent of a wave both cresting and troughing. In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) Gilles Deleuze writes, “The world is the infinite curve that touches at an infinity of points an infinity of curves.” The momentum of the girl on the swing corresponds with this idea of the infinite curve, giving the photograph its sense of duration, its subject swinging back and forth well beyond temporal and formal limitations.
Peter Hujar, Girl on Swing, Southbury, 1957. Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York, © The Peter Hujar Archive – Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
After first recognizing the curve in this photo, I began to see it everywhere: waves or folds, both subtle and obvious, become the invisible string binding the exhibition together with subliminal force. This mode of looking—not for the pricking detail, but through relational movements— shifted my thinking away from Barthes’s punctum and the well-worn adjacency between the medium and mortality. “Continuity is made up no less of distances between points of view than of the length of an infinity of corresponding curves, ” Deleuze continues. It is there in Newsstand, 96th Street and Broadway (1957), with its snow-piled awnings sagging in deep concavities; in the waving decorative woodwork framing one side of the previously mentioned cat photograph; and in one of the exhibition’s penultimate moments, the moving Vince Aletti, Fire Island [With Arms Raised] (1969), in which Hujar’s friend, the noted photography critic and writer, holds a beach blanket above him, the diaphanous fabric rising and falling over his spread arms like wings, its curves echoed in both his smile and shell necklace.
Peter Hujar, Paul Thek on Zebra, 1965. Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum. © The Peter Hujar Archive – Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
But it is one photograph that best illustrates this notion of the living curve, the life cycle, that animates Hujar’s portraits of both the living and the dead. In Paul Thek in the Surf, Fire Island (1966), the artist lies nude on the beach as a wave engulfs his body. Thek lifts his head of wet shaggy hair to gleefully face the camera, as his butt also surfaces behind him. The wave, seemingly at once crashing and receding, creates a curve that entangles Thek’s emerging body in a corresponding one. While easily read as a riff on academic paintings of the birth of Venus—especially Cabanel’s notorious version from 1863— Hujar undermines those depictions by blurring the distinction between man and sea. The undulations of the body move with the enveloping wave. Thek’s handsome face conveys palpable joy, and the composition gestures to continuing life and movement. Instead of a single wounding punctum, we look for waves, crashing on the shore only to return seconds later, each one different but composed of the same sea. It is the constant involution of life depicted here, as in so many works in the exhibition, that exemplifies an invigorated sense of being. Hujar’s careful eye always catches the immediacy of lived experience at its brink, letting it repeat in the mind of the viewer like a subliminal hum. This reading, though, should not be seen as minimizing the necessary monuments to the massive losses caused by AIDS. Instead, I posit it as another way to think of the photograph, and, of course, to honor Hujar’s skill for facing life directly (in all its stages). He is able, as Deleuze says, to “peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul.”
Doroshenko cannily closes the exhibition with Doves in the Circus (1973), the birds’ preening tail feathers fanning out in a dense arrangement of semicircles. In an exhibition tour, he noted that he wanted to end Rialto with hope and peace dedicated to those in Ukraine currently enduring the brutalities of war with Russia. The photo goes far in reminding the viewer that Hujar always calibrated his photographic eye towards life. These curves sustain the folding and unfolding of the soul I see as central to his work: the cycle of life that carries us forth.
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