Peter Hujar. Speed of Life. At The Morgan Library and Museum

I met Peter Hujar on two occasions. My acquaintance with him is one of the most unusual in my thirty years in New York. Many, many, many others came and went but Peter, at least in name, lodged in my mind.

While living on East 82^nd Street in 1960 I met a man in his fifties who was an artist and who made his living working for Esquire Magazine as a mechanical artist. He asked me to pose for him for a portrait and while doing so he asked if I knew the name, Peter Hujar. I did not. He said that I looked like Peter...we were both Tony Perkins clones at that age ...and from photographs in this catalog I can see that we did look much alike. Later he thought that Peter and I could benefit from knowing one another and he invited the two of us for a Sunday brunch at his apartment. On his arrival I could see immediately that Peter had no interest in me. He was a young person starting his career, he was visibly ambitious, and he was only interested, I suspected, in knowing people who could further his progress. As a green young thing just out of Kansas, I was hardly what he had hoped to find across the breakfast table.

I think I recall that he had a rolleiflex on a cord around his neck and that some of the conversation had to do with the qualities of that camera. Our host, Luke, had a rollei as well. I knew noting about cameras and so I could only listen politely to something I did not understand. After a visit of an acceptable length of time, Peter thanked his host and left.

For the next several years that I knew him my friend Luke continued to keep me informed of Peter’s progress. On excursions into the East Village he would point out the building on 12^th and Second Avenue where Peter lived. He would send me out to buy magazines and newspapers when Peter’s work was featured. While this man knew many people in the arts through his work ...at all levels of success ...his fascination with Peter was really unusual and I wondered if there might not be more to it, psychologically or sexually, than just an interest in a talented young man’s career progress.

In 1970 or 71 I fell into conversation with a somewhat familiar looking man in Madison Square Park who while talking began to look me over in an unusual way. Eventually he asked if he could photograph me and when I asked him when he wanted to do it he said right now. So we went across 23^rd Street to his studio. As we entered I saw the name Peter Hujar on the door and I asked if he was Peter. He said that he was. I reminded him of our meeting some ten years earlier. He said that he remembered the man from Esquire magazine but that he did not remember the brunch. He apologized for that with much sincerity. But he did ask how I was able to remember it for ten years and I told him that Luke followed his career and never missed an opportunity to keep me informed and to remind me of our meeting. The revelation that he was memorable or famous to an unknown public seemed to disquiet him.

There was a floor to ceiling mirror on the wall of this otherwise empty room and as he shuffled about arranging equipment he looked me over both in the flesh and in the mirror as if I were an object to be placed in a composition or something that could be used to realize a concept. I had the strongest sense that he did not see me as a person. After much consideration he apologized for taking my time and said that he was not going to take any pictures. I was uncertain if it was because of an equipment failure or if I had failed to pass muster. “That’s fine.” I said. And I left. He did not ask me to “keep in touch”.

Over the years, as I saw Peter’s name here and there I would smile and chide myself that I was one of the few persons in this world for whom Peter had no interest at all.

I always insist that anyone wanting to know a photographer’s work must go to a gallery or a museum or wherever he can to see the artist’s prints. In this exhibition a handsome catalog has been published, by Aperture, with the prints measuring generally 8 inches square. I think it would be impossible to complain about anything in this book. However: when face to face with the artist's prints, about 14 ¾ by 14 ¾ inches on 16 by 20 sheets, and flawlessly made, one can only then realize what exquisite prints they are and what a great photographer Peter Hujar was. What appears to be so casual and effortless in a book or on the internet can be seen to be the result of talent, education, hard work, and artistry in the gallery. This comes from the fact that there are dichotomies in his life and work which need to be understood in order to understand his work.

The story told is that Peter lived in the East Village during its counter cultural heyday and that he was not an outsider but an intimate, that he had had a troubled childhood and had been shunted from parents to grandparents, and that all of this had left him angry and disturbed. Yes, Peter lived on lower Second Avenue and he frequented the neighborhood places. But when I met him he was adept at entering into an uptown social event, of deporting himself in the manner required, and in taking his leave comfortably and with respect to all present. He was definitely not an antisocial barbarian or sociopath. And as we study the full range of his achievement in this exhibition we see that for all the experimentation in his life and his world ...sex, art, drugs ... in his photography there was an acceptance of a technique and skill that is consistently the same from first to last. It is never casual. It is never experimental. It never pushed the envelope into “new” territory. It is always familiar and it always achieves excellence.

The key to this, I believe, is to be found in Plate 97, 1977, which presents us with a portrait of Rose and Ed Murphy. Rose was Peter’s mother and Ed his step father. They lived on East 32 Street and Second Avenue across from what is now Kips Bay Plaza and even then that section of Manhattan was a middle class enclave. Although Peter lived with his grandmother and aunt and uncle in New Jersey for a time after his birth, his father disappeared before he was born, upon the death of his grandmother he moved back with his mother and lived there on 32^nd Street through middle school and high school.

In the photograph Rose and Ed Murphy appear to be middle class New Yorkers. They have dressed for the occasion. He wears a polyester leisure suit, she wears tailored slacks and a blouse. He is well groomed. Her hair has been done. She wears jewelry but nothing ostentatious. She appears to be the stronger of the two; he seems to be a man with a personality deficit, someone who can be used to fill out a crowd. They look as if they might spend part of the winter in Florida. They are proud, quiet people who know their place, who respect their place, and who have all the confidence in the world that their company is acceptable in any civilized social situation. They know how to behave and how to blend into a crowd. (We often encounter characters like these in the works of John Cheever.) I am certain that when he lived with them Peter was expected to behave himself like a gentleman, to do his school work without complaint, to know his place, to respect his place, and to be an asset in any social engagement.

In 1945, at the age of eleven, Peter made his first photographs using his mother’s camera, an Argus C3. The C 3 was a state of the art 35mm camera. When I bought one for ten dollars in a pawn shop in 1962 ...on 26^th Street and 3^rd Avenue ... professional photographers I knew told me that in the day it had been the work horse of the industry. It was not a piece of equipment an east side housewife would go out and buy on a whim ...in current dollars it cost about six hundred dollars, there was nothing automatic about it, it required that the exposure and the focus be set for each shot. Was Peter’s mother a photographer? Did she introduce him to photography? I am willing to bet that it was she who bequeathed to him his very strong work ethic: with setting up a shot, organizing the elements, shooting, developing, printing, soliciting other work, assaying the work for exhibitions, the life of a freelance photographer is a busy and a hard life. Without a puritan work ethic one gets no where. All play and no work leaves Jack along the roadside.

Apparently things did not go well for Peter at home. It doesn’t for most adolescents. He moved out when he was 16 and lived on his own the last year of high school. Later his mother disapproved of his overt homosexuality and his solution to that was to no longer see her. And so he slipped into the gay world, the East Village world, the art scene. But breeding will tell and like Tennessee Williams I suspect that Peter was always a gentleman.

The photograph of Rose and Ed Murphy is dated 1977. Was this printed in 1977 or was it created in that year? If so this is 25 years after Peter moved out ...approximately 1952-53. That hardly verifies the myth that his break with his mother was early and final. Rather it must have been a long and drawn out difficult relationship ... not unlike others I could name, many others!

It also tell us a lot about Peter Hujar the photographer. This looks to have been made in his studio. The wall and floor behind them can be seen in other photographs of a similar date. It is not spontaneous. It is not a psychological study. It has been composed. The composition begins at the bottom with a knife-like thin triangle of floor. The lighting has not been used for modeling but to create a range of tonal values, almost a mosaic of white and mid range grays. And it is very reminiscent, (was this intended?) of his 1969 photograph, Sheep, Pennsylvania, Plate 46. which is also a composition of tonal values, mid range grays moving into black and also lacking any psychological insight. In fact the number of photographs he made with two persons and sometimes animals is remarkable.(An obvious reference to Diane Arbus’ Twins, among other similarities to her work.) In many of his twins photographs the two persons are named but it is not indicated if that is to be read from left to right or right to left. Two names. Two persons. But which is which? I think to Peter it did not matter: each was merely a component of a single composition.

Composition is vital to his work. There is abundant evidence of a strong commitment to his aesthetic and that he hews to it rigidly. His compositions are always made from the tonal values, as if he had been drilled and drilled in Arthur Dow’s book, Composition, with its emphasis on notan, the harmony of light/dark. Apparently he never worked with color film.

One of the talking points in the photography magazines in the 60’s and 70’s was the question: Does one compose to the format or does one crop the composition from within the format after shooting from the hip? From the contact sheets we can see that Peter composed to the format. In Plate 122, Group Photograph, we can see Peter reflected in a mirror and that he is using at that time, 1966, a Hasselblad camera which, like the rollei, used 120 film with a square format. I suspect that he generally printed the whole of the negative; almost all of his photographs are square. We can see that he did not fire off shot after shot after shot but took his time, created his composition, and released the shutter when he saw, in living color, the composition as it would be on paper in black and white. Let me repeat that: “...he saw , in living color, the composition as it would be on paper in black and white.” And that is Peter’s remarkable talent: he was a master of composing with values he knew to be there but could not see until the film was developed and printed. Road, West Virginia, 1969, Plate 20, is a supreme illustration of this mastery as is Plate 159, Blanket on the famous chair, 1983, or Water tank and tower, 1974.

For a person who had only a high school education, he majored in photography for three years at the New York City Commercial Trades High School and later worked as a studio assistant to a professional photographer, he had a remarkable grasp of the craft of photography. But it was an education in greater depth than that of Yosef Karsh who had only been trained as a studio assistant. And Harry Callahan, America’s greatest photographer, had no formal education in photography or studio apprenticeship at all. This might well indicate that great photographers are born not made.

Peter’s dark room work is extraordinary. As I have said, these are flawless prints. (Unfortunately the museum has chosen to show them with really inferior, glaring lighting. Shame on them!) And there are many instances where it can be seen how he had complete mastery over the printing process. Plate 18, Public Garden, Taormina, 1959 has a wonderful cascade of blending from top to bottom of light to dark, as does Plate 5. Horse in West Virginia,1969, and the witty Washing on a Clothes Line, 1978., Plate 105. in which the blend (was this set up?) reads from left to right, or perhaps right to left. Dinner for Don Nice, Plate 78 is an all over design of tonal values much like an abstract expressionist painting. (There are many references to abstract expressionist paintings here.) And in Rockefeller Center, Plate 98, the architectural logic is so askew that it took me a long time to realize that it was a collage rephotographed and passed off as a street view. (Another example of his wit?) I find all of his architectural photographs of New York City somehow strange; were these editorial assignments? Was he seeking editorial assignments? There’s a reference to Berenice Abbott and Harry Callahan, but beyond that they are very common for the day: I took a lot of photographs like these and I would hardly call myself a photographer.

I am also somewhat mystified by his portraits. Almost none of them are psychological studies. Having put the models in place, he seems to have waited until their attention wandered before making the shot. (Irving Penn did a similar series of portraits.) Thus we have a world populated by persons living in a half life. I knew several of these people. I did not know any of them in this way. And I am a long way away from having read Against Interpretation, Peter’s friend Susan Sontag’s very seminal 1960’s essay. Perhaps therein lies the explanation.

There is a far wider range of subject matter here than I have been aware of. To my knowledge Peter is best known as the chronicler of the East Village arts scene, the gay liberation movement, the shadowy nights of the deserted west side Manhattan streets, the abandoned piers. If you google Peter those are the images that come up. This exhibition consists of 100 works from the collection, a recent gift to the Morgan, and an additional 60 prints. The choices here make us aware that Peter often “referenced’ or as they now say… “quoted” other photographers, perhaps his favorite photographers. There is at the opening the Peter Jumping photograph a la Richard Avedon's Jump Book. There are references to Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, perhaps Aaron Siskin. I wish this had been discussed in the catalog.

Many of Peter’s more well know works have attained the stature of icons. Seeing those works beside the work I did not know about ...the animals, the architecture, the fascination with the surface of a large body of water ...the rather editorial portraits... compels us to approach his iconic works with new eyes, for instance Candy Darling on her death bed. Plate 32, 1973.

Peter’s work for the most part is straight on, upright and rigid. Occasionally it is relieved by a composition on the diagonal. Such is Candy Darling. She and the bed are on the diagonal. And we see the diagonal of her body repeated and emphasized in her forearm resting atop her head. It is one of the whitest areas of the photograph. Her face is white, her eyes and mouth almost black with make up ...as she often was in “real” life. And then we notice her dark gown, nestled between the very white sheets On a table behind her, standing out against the black of the wall there is a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. That bouquet is echoed, rhymed, on the left with the black silhouette of a bouquet of roses. A black silhouette of a long stemmed rose has been placed on the bed beside her. A hospital bed table pushed in just enough on the right identifies the location for us.

Whereas in the past I approached this with reverence and respect, because of the title, because I had enjoyed her street theater, I see now that I cannot do that. This is not a found photograph in the sense of an Ansel Adams found photograph. Despite the title Candy looks the picture of her usual good health. This is a composition. It is manufactured, just as Candy Darling was manufactured. The person Candy Darling never existed. She was a celebrity, a made up personality like Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, or Harpo Marx. She brought a little bit of west coast glamour to the gritty streets of the lower east side. This manufactured image, her last, is a glorification, an homage in gratitude to the pleasure she brought into the world. It was made for her. It was publicity for her exit from the stage of life. (“Out, out brief candle…”). Peter was her George Hurrell. It is camp. Today it is the iconic image of her: most people only know her as someone who died.

Should the others of Peter’s compositions be read in this same way? Are any of these images found photographs? Are all of them or only some of them conceptualized and composed by the artist? I believe there is a mixture of both but that it requires long looking to ascertain which is which. Would knowing that help us to understand why he quoted and referenced so often.

Peter Hujar on his death bed is the photograph of a person at his moment of death. It was planned; a camera was at the ready. But unlike Candy who played a role, he was real. I can attest to that from first hand experience. His work is real. It exists on the wall in front of us. It is filled with silence. But like the sound and fury of another time it too signifies nothing. It is a visual experience. It is immediate. It is alive. And it is blemish free.

Thanks to The Morgan for keeping it going.