Peter Hujar’s Eyes Open in the Dark is filled with intimacies and confrontations, empty lots, New York up close and seen from afar, hidden spaces and days in the country, sex and bodies, life and death. The effects are cumulative, taking us on a journey that is filled with variety, tenderness and vulnerability, surprise and shock.
Here is a man’s naked leg, foot planted on the floor. There’s William Burroughs, lounging and insouciant, Susan Sontag looking at the ceiling, a man and his dog sheathed in cellophane, like a gift you didn’t expect. A cow says hello over a fence. Caving in, door ajar, here’s a wrecked white shack, paint peeling and worn away, collapsed on its side in the New Jersey night, like a mendicant dropped exhausted on the way to somewhere else. And now a man on a chair, sucking his own big toe, an image that’s all strain and urge and beautiful contortion.
Hujar’s photographs come at you one by one and all at once in a ravishing exhibition that dwells, mostly, on his work from the 1970s and 80s, right up to the time of his death in 1987, from Aids-related complications, at the age of 53. Focus shifts with every step.
This show is overwhelming in its intensity, the swerves from subject to subject, from studied portraiture to sudden confrontation, from the studio to the world, from the bed to the church steps on Easter Sunday, and to the abandoned east side piers with their rotting spaces commandeered for sex and for impromptu art shows. Luminous sea mist clings to the corporate towers on Sixth Avenue and there’s a commotion on the quayside, a world of clamour and incident. Often Hujar would photograph all these things on a single day, Rolleiflex camera always in hand.
Hung close, the images go by in speeding rows and runs. You come at them askance and face them one by one, and walk them with a slow, measured pace. They surprise and trap you in intimate situations and they run you down. Hujar’s work has a complex musicality. Then we’re on a late-night corner where there’s nothing but a fire hydrant buried in weeds. Further along the cobbled street a pallet and a tyre lean against a wall. Lit by the streetlights, the details look as deliberately placed as sculpture, leading the eye to a car mysteriously parked at a distant intersection. There’s no one there but us and whoever’s behind the lit windows high up and far off in a New York night that’s forever gone.
Some images are grouped in tight grids, filling your field of vision and sending your eye on restless, unexpected and bewildering journeys from subject to subject. The images are mostly square and mostly the same size and hung in matted white frames. There’s no colour, and Hujar was specific with his papers and his silver gelatin prints, all developed and printed in his apartment darkroom. However quick and sudden, or posed and calculated, the shot was, Hujar gave every image time, attending to their calibrated gradations of tonality. His work has tremendous formal rigour and sublety, and a clarity achieved as much in the darkroom as inside the camera.
How beautiful and miraculous and complex Hujar’s art is, taking us to open-casket funerals and the backstage corridors of a Robert Wilson opera, where we meet a guy in fishnets and a gimp mask. We go from a field in Pennsylvania to a glade in Florida, where Hujar’s one-time lover, artist Paul Thek, lies under the trees like an animal encountered in the wild. Hujar explores the cruising grounds of the dilapidated East River piers to a space with nothing in it but a blanket folded on a straight-backed chair. He lovingly records scars on a man’s torso and an arid slag-heap, drawing the eye between the heaps of undifferentiated pewtery dross to a little piece of trash that catches the light. A horse stands patiently in a field, its flank a velvety near-black against a hill whose pale edge softens into an even paler sky, the image is an essay in gradation.
Hujar, cigarette between his lips, looks at the camera and squints against the smoke. His self-portraits range from the casual to the studied. He sits naked and looks back at the lens with unfathomable knowingness. He goofs around and sticks a gnarly dildo inside himself. Here’s an ass shot, piss dribbling between his legs. Hujar’s candour demands our own. In 1976, he photographed dancer Bruce de Sainte Croix masturbating. We see the man standing, on his knees and seated. There’s emptiness all around him, an air of silent concentration and self-absorption. The dancer’s foot brushes the lower edge of the image and leads us in. His foot, his face, the shadows under the chair and the space around him are all as compelling as the act itself, stilled. My eye wanders in between things, returns and returns again. There’s such grace here.
On one day that same year (1976), Hujar shot a series of photographs of the Hudson and East rivers, filling the frame with the slop and heave of the waters. In one, a trough in the swell becomes a sudden bowl of light. Elsewhere light skitters across the waves like errant scratches on the negative. Sunlight glances on a bubble, the lightest light in the photograph floating against a plummeting darkness that goes down and down. The depth and surface of vision are all there in these mesmeric studies.
And then we come to Hujar dead in his hospital room (coincidentally, it is the same room where he had photographed transgender actor Candy Darling as she lay dying of lymphoma 13 years earlier, in 1974). Photographed three times by his artist friend David Wojnarowicz. First the head, then the hands, then Hujar’s bare feet, a harrowing sequence asking only for silence. Nearby hangs a 1985 portrait of Wojnarowicz, weirdly reminiscent of Phillip IV of Spain with his Habsburg jaw, like a Velásquez king in downtown disguise. An earlier 1981 portrait has Wojnarowicz with his fingers in front of his face, eyes downcast. What a quivering, pallid, vulnerable image this is, his forehead smudged with shadow, his fingers a defence against the camera. Past lovers, Wojnarowicz and Hujar shared an uncompromising attitude to art and life. More than that, their enduring friendship may also have been cemented by bonds of trauma and damaged childhoods.
Whenever you stop you’re on the brink of being swept away again, the pull of another image asking for attention. Even when they are funny Hujar’s images all have a certain gravity, and however quick and unguarded a shot might have been, however casual an image might appear, each photograph evidences Hujar’s meticulous, painstaking approach to his craft. For all his vexations – Hujar’s anger and intemperance and frustrations, his outbursts and volatility and depressions, his poverty and impossibility as a human being, none of this seems to get into his photographs. When you look at his work, all that falls away. Hujar’s unwillingness to compromise and his disdain for the market evidences a consummate discipline. He didn’t, or couldn’t, make things easy for himself.
You have to hold on to the images so as not to get snared by backstories and circumstances and rumours and fantasies and all the baggage we carry around with us. His photographs are memorable even when we don’t think we have time for them. They arrest us and won’t let go.
