In a long-awaited celebration of one of New York City’s most significant yet under-recognized photographers, a new exhibition at London’s Raven Row gallery is casting a spotlight on the profound and moving work of Peter Hujar. Hujar, who passed away in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia, was known for his strikingly intimate black-and-white portraits that captured the vibrant gay community and downtown arts scene of 1970s New York with unparalleled warmth, sensitivity, and depth of feeling.
Bringing Hujar’s Vision to Light
Titled “Eyes Open in the Dark,” the Raven Row exhibition is the largest showing of Hujar’s work ever mounted in the UK. The show aims to introduce a wider audience to a photographer whose immense talent went largely unheralded during his lifetime, with his sole published book, Portraits in Life and Death, receiving a mere four reviews before his untimely death at age 53.
As exhibition director Alex Sainsbury explains, Hujar’s relative obscurity stemmed not from any lack of skill or vision, but rather from the boldly unconventional nature of his subject matter combined with his often contentious relationships with galleries and dealers. “He was considered a great photographer by a very small group of people around him,” notes Hujar’s close friend and fellow artist Gary Schneider. “He did exhibit but he was very contentious – if someone put a foot wrong he would cancel them.”
Illuminating a Cultural Moment
What makes Hujar’s work so compelling is not only the technical mastery and compositional elegance of his images, but the way he used his camera to document and pay tribute to a particular cultural milieu at a pivotal juncture in history. His portraits serve as a kind of visual record of the painters, performers, writers, musicians, and drag artists who formed the nucleus of the downtown New York avant-garde in the years before the AIDS crisis would decimate their ranks.
There’s an increased interest in empathy in art, people are looking for it and Peter’s work has it. It has this knife-edge quality between austerity and empathy.
– Alex Sainsbury, Director of Raven Row
Among Hujar’s most frequent subjects were luminaries like Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and Andy Warhol. But he trained his lens just as lovingly on the drag queens, street kids, and anonymous denizens of the Chelsea piers, rendering them all with the same deep compassion and attentiveness. As curator and Hujar biographer John Douglas Millar observes, “What he’s photographing is difficult for the mainstream to accept; he didn’t fit in the 1970s. He can get a much better reading now than he could in the 1970s, it wasn’t fashionable.”
Exploring the Range of Hujar’s Interests
While Hujar is primarily known for his portraiture, the Raven Row exhibition makes a point of showcasing the impressive diversity of photographic modes he worked in over the course of his career. The show devotes special attention to a single day of shooting Hujar undertook on Easter Sunday in 1976, which found him traveling all over the city to capture subjects ranging from churchgoers to cruising spots to views from atop the World Trade Center.
- Hujar’s Easter 1976 series reveals his interest in:
- Architectural studies
- Street photography
- Documenting gay social spaces
- Erotic art photography
This eclectic body of work from a single day exemplifies the expansive nature of Hujar’s photographic practice, which extended well beyond the studio portraiture for which he is best remembered. “He’s moving across genres in a single day,” Millar points out.
Hujar’s Growing Influence and Legacy
In the years since his death, Hujar’s artistic reputation has continued to grow, with contemporary photographers like Nan Goldin citing him as a key influence and inspiration. The Raven Row exhibition seems likely to further burnish his legacy and win him the widespread recognition that eluded him in life.
Hujar is even set to be the subject of a major feature film, with actor Ben Whishaw portraying him in director Ira Sach’s upcoming biopic Peter Hujar’s Day, based on a book by Hujar’s close friend Linda Rosenkrantz. The movie, which premiered to positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, promises to introduce the photographer’s story to an even vaster global audience.
As the art world re-examines Hujar’s groundbreaking oeuvre with fresh eyes, his ability to discover beauty and meaning in the margins of society feels more vital and relevant than ever. “Eyes Open in the Dark” invites viewers to see New York City in the 1970s through Hujar’s penetrating lens, and in doing so, to reflect on the revolutionarypower of art to forge human connections across boundaries of time, place and identity.
