The curators of an exhibition of one of New York’s most important photographers, who captured gay life in the city during the 1970s, hope the show will shed new light on an artist whose work was deemed too “difficult” in his lifetime.
Eyes Open in the Dark, which opens at Raven Row in London on Thursday, is the largest UK exhibition of photographs by the late photographer Peter Hujar, who has been acclaimed for the warmth and compassion of his images but was little known during his lifetime.
Hujar died in 1987 of Aids-related pneumonia having published one book in his lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death, which received just four reviews. His sitters were some of the most culturally significant figures of 70s New York, including Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz.
Hujar is about to be played on the big screen by Ben Whishaw in Ira Sachs’ film Peter Hujar’s Day, which premiered at Sundance on Monday and is based on a 37-page book of the same name written by his close friend Linda Rosenkrantz.
The story follows one day in Hujar’s life which contained an opportunity to photograph the beat poet Allen Ginsberg but mostly consisted of, as IndieWire observed, “a lot of quotidian nothingness”.
The film has received positive reviews, with the Hollywood Reporter calling it “one of the most descriptive evocations of the 1970s downtown art scene … since Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids”. Variety praised Whishaw and Rebecca Hall’s performance as Rosenkrantz, and called the film “a pointillistic snapshot of one day”.
It’s an incredible turnaround for a photographer who, other than from a small, committed group of advocates including Nan Goldin, struggled for recognition in his lifetime and has only found it in the last decade.
Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar said that the Raven Row exhibition features Hujar’s later work, alongside the portraiture for which he has become known.
For example, there is a particular focus on the photographer’s work during one day in 1976. “There’s a single day on Easter Sunday when he made an extraordinary series of works,” Millar said. “He shoots the faithful coming out of church uptown, then moves down to the west side piers where there was a cruising scene and an arts scene, and he ends the day by going to the top of the World Trade Center and takes an image of his world. He’s moving across genres in a single day.”
Millar said the series showed the range of interests that Hujar had, which spanned portraiture, architectural studies and erotica.
Gary Schneider, an artist and friend of Hujar, admitted Hujar could be unforgiving at times and was particularly short with gallerists, which could explain why his work is only now being sought out.
Schneider said: “He was considered a great photographer by a very small group of people around him. He did exhibit but he was very contentious – if someone put a foot wrong he would cancel them.”
Raven Row’s director, Alex Sainsbury, said: “It’s fair to say he was great at collaborating with the sitters but he wasn’t good at working with anyone who ran a gallery or might promote his work.”
Despite Hujar’s spiky reputation he has been embraced by contemporary art fans, primarily because of the tenderness of his photographs, many of which were of downtown art figures who went on to die during the Aids crisis.
“There’s an increased interest in empathy in art, people are looking for it and Peter’s work has it,” Sainsbury said. “It has this knife-edge quality between austerity and empathy.”
Millar said: “What he’s photographing is difficult for the mainstream to accept; he didn’t fit in the 1970s. A lot of stuff he was shooting, especially his erotica, wouldn’t have worked. He can get a much better reading now that it couldn’t in the 1970s, it wasn’t fashionable.”
Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark runs from 30 January to 6 April.
