Peter Hujar

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Peter Hujar war born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. At the age of twelve he moved to Manhattan with his mother, and on gradua­ting from the High School of Art and Design he became an assistant to Richard Avedon. Until the early 1970s he worked as a commer­cial photo­gra­pher for adver­ti­sing agencies and fashion magazines (Harper’s Bazaar).

Then he turned his back on the adver­ti­sing world. Constructed realities, which use formal trickery to convert nature into artifice, did not interest Hujar; his concern was with the motif pure and simple. He was swimming against an artistic mainstream that in the 1970s sought to alter conven­tional modes of seeing and percep­tion by using experi­mental forms of expres­sion, and conse­quently abandoned tradi­tional materials, spaces, dimen­sions, and bounda­ries. The photo­graphers of the day worked not in indivi­dual images but in series, operating with distor­tion, impre­cision, color depla­ce­ment, and a variety of supports. Above all, thier work spread itself across large surfaces. Hujar remained an artistic outsider, one who refused to conform to the Zeitgeist.

In this sense his mostly recti­li­near,  black-and-white prints, and the simple, clear, rigorous contruc­tion of his images, often takten in a bare studio with a minimum of props, make a clear counter­state­ment. There is a classical feel to his work. In formal terms, it recalls the Existen­tia­list photo­graphy of the 1950s, though its content is very different: it deals with Hujar’s personal world, the world of homose­xuals and transvestites.

In contrast to the syste­matic, struc­tu­ra­list-oriented research and presen­ta­tion that typified 1970s art, Hujar was only ever interested in what stood or sat or lay or grew or leapt in front of his own eyes: the human being, the horse, the shoe, water. The melan­choly of the moment the funda­men­tals of existence, emerge in his work through emptiness: the emptiness of time, of tedium, of death. Hujar never posed his shots. He photo­gra­phed only what the subjects were prepared to show him, in the way they wanted to show it. There is always an intensely intimate look on his work, and it is never voryeuristic.

Hujar gave hist first book of photo­graphs, published in 1976, the program­matic titel Portraits in Life and Death: its images are of dying artist friends in New York and of decom­posed cadavers in the catacombs of Palermo. He set out to describe the vulnera­bi­lity and transi­ence of human beings, with no heroics. Another theme of equal impor­t­ance was the presen­ta­tion of sexuality and nakedness as each of us know them; never alien, but everyday, with no erotic clichés. He made no appeal to secret fantasies, as Helmut Newton did; nor did he set out, like Robert Mapplethorpe, to make nakedness into an aesthetic statement – even in his shots of erect penises. This approach, his distaste for the “art business”, and his public engage­ment of homose­xua­lity, are probably the reasons why Hujar has hitherto remained compa­ra­tively little known. It is only now, when the age of invention and experi­ment with the museum seems to be at an end – and it is, above all, as a counter­vai­ling force to the flood of images that threatens to swamp us – that we are learning to value the rapt stillness of his photographs.

Peter Hujar’s first European exhibi­tion was organized by Jean-Chris­tophe Ammann and the artist for the Kunst­mu­seum. Basel, in 1981; the Wolfsburg exhibi­tion, which comprises nearly 150 works, is the first retro­spec­tive presen­ta­tion of his photo­gra­phic pieces in Germany. It has already been shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Fotomu­seum, Winterthur.