The subjects of Peter Hujar’s arresting black-and-white photographs from the 1950s through the 1980s were the citizens of his New York: the famous and niche-famous, beloved friends and sometime boyfriends, smoldering artists and playful drag performers, leather-clad lovers and distinguished pets. Mr. Hujar published only one monograph in his lifetime, “Portraits in Life and Death,” which features figures like John Waters, Fran Lebowitz and Susan Sontag alongside dozens of nameless remains from the Palermo catacombs.
When Mr. Hujar died in 1987, from complications of AIDS at age 53, he was so desperate for money that he had been trading his prints for medical care. Now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds his work, and original copies of “Portraits in Life and Death” that originally sold for $8.95 easily fetch a hundred times as much online. But as of Tuesday, his only book will sell for $75, as a republication from W. W. Norton.
John Waters, the filmmaker and ardent defender of bad taste, said that when he looks at his portrait from the book, he thinks, “Ahh, youth!” In the photo, Mr. Waters lies on striped bedding in a button-up shirt. “He caught you a little vulnerable because you’re in bed with a stranger, basically,” Mr. Waters, 78, said. “Peter made you look gritty, but good. And smart! That’s hard. A lot of smart people look ugly.”
Fran Lebowitz, the writer and wit, who lives in Manhattan, met Mr. Hujar in the early 1970s. He often visited her parents’ house, and Ms. Lebowitz still has the signed copy of “Portraits in Life and Death” that he gave to them. He photographed Ms. Lebowitz a few times, including for the monograph, but she wouldn’t allow him to take her picture for her book jacket. “This was the one fight I had with Peter,” Ms. Lebowitz, 73, said. She recalled telling him: “‘I don’t want a photograph of my soul on my book.’ That must be what I thought he was doing. He was a very profound person.”
Ms. Lebowitz said she was troubled by all the attention being lavished on her friend years after his death. “It’s upsetting,” she said, adding: “Peter was the poorest person I knew. He had nothing. He made zero money in his lifetime. Now all this attention is on him: This was exactly what he wanted in his life, and he didn’t get it.”
The writer Linda Rosenkrantz, 90, who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., and was perhaps one of Mr. Hujar’s most documented subjects, wrote a slim nonfiction account of her friend called “Peter Hujar’s Day.” Mr. Hujar took Ms. Rosenkrantz’s photograph countless times, including for her wedding and for her books. “I think he would have liked to have been famous, he just didn’t know how to go about it,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been surprised by this. He knew he was good.”
Another friend and colleague of Mr. Hujar’s, the artist Gary Schneider, 69, who lives on Long Island, has been agitating for the republishing for years. Mr. Schneider met Mr. Hujar a year after the monograph was first released, “and he was still complaining about it.” Mr. Hujar was proud of the photos, Mr. Schneider said, but disappointed in the quality of the publication.
Mr. Schneider started printing Mr. Hujar’s photographs in the 1980s and continues to do so today. He said he remembered a confident bitterness in his friend, who would buzz his intercom, announcing himself as the senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art at the time, who didn’t like Mr. Hujar’s work.
The experimental theater artist Robert Wilson, who lives in Water Mill, N.Y., said the long lead-up to Mr. Hujar’s public embrace matches the subtlety of his friend’s photographs. “The surface of the works are very simple; that’s always where the mystery is,” Mr. Wilson, 83, said. “It takes you a longer time to see it, because it doesn’t scream at you for attention.” Mr. Wilson remembers Mr. Hujar taking his photo for this monograph in Mr. Wilson’s Lower Manhattan apartment at the time. Taking a photo with Mr. Hujar, Mr. Wilson said, “was very quiet. It’s almost like he wasn’t there.”
Another of Mr. Hujar’s friends, the photography curator and writer Vince Aletti, 79, who lives in the East Village, appears in a photo of “Portraits in Life and Death” with a neat mustache. In the 1970s, Mr. Aletti lived just a few blocks from Mr. Hujar, and they would meet up for tuna noodle casseroles and chats. “The book says so much about our relationships,” Mr. Aletti said, “and our relationship to the time that it was made.” He points out Mr. Hujar’s strategy of posing his subjects lying down, to seem as if Mr. Hujar had just found them there.
Mr. Hujar’s photos, Mr. Aletti said, “aren’t prettified like other photographers’. There was something that he wanted to capture about his subjects — maybe not beauty, but an incandescence.”
The executor of Mr. Hujar’s estate, Stephen Koch, became close with the photographer in 1975, on the eve of the printing of the monograph. Mr. Koch recalled taking care of Ms. Sontag at the hospital for the first of her cancer surgeries. “At the last minute, she said: ‘Oh, I promised Peter I would write an introduction to his book. Bring me some paper.’” She was in bed already, and she wrote it in 40 minutes.
The next morning, Mr. Koch typed the introduction and delivered it to Mr. Hujar. About a decade later, Mr. Hujar asked Mr. Koch to manage his art after he died. (“He gave me a zinger, which was so typical: ‘You’re no good, but you’re the best I have.’”) Mr. Koch has spent the last decades fostering Mr. Hujar’s reputation, his efforts culminating in the achievement of this reprinting of Mr. Hujar’s only book.
Many of Mr. Hujar’s friends credit “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life,” a 2018 exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan, with jump-starting the artist’s revival in the cultural imagination. The curator of that show, Joel Smith, 59, said that the mix of portraits and still lifes in this monograph illuminated the photographer’s facility with stillness. “I think of a therapist, who waits for the person to let things emerge that don’t come about when things are chatty and full of buzz and noise,” Mr. Smith said. In Mr. Hujar’s portraits, “you have a sense of people alone with themselves.”
Mr. Hujar’s name will be even more widely known in the coming years. Ira Sachs, director of the 2023 film “Passages,” has just filmed a biopic about Mr. Hujar starring Ben Whishaw, with Rebecca Hall playing Linda Rosenkrantz. And Andrew Durbin, editor in chief of the contemporary art magazine Frieze, is at work on a joint biography of Mr. Hujar and the artist Paul Thek.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator Benjamin Moser, 48, who wrote a new foreword for this edition, described an ambivalence around Mr. Hujar’s ascendant profile over the past decade. The more the photographer is deified, Mr. Moser said, the more it ushers “a kind of forgetting that involves turning into this icon, turning into something to put on Instagram. It’s very conflictual for anyone.”
Mr. Moser said he hoped that the silvery strangeness of Mr. Hujar’s work could survive his popularity. Speaking in the days before a reprinting that would bring Mr. Hujar’s work into even more people’s lives, Mr. Moser said, “I hope that people feel daunted by him.”
The post Peter Hujar’s Only Book Is Back in Print. His Friends Say It’s About Time. appeared first on New York Times.
