IN 1974, THE writer Linda Rosenkrantz asked the photographer Peter Hujar, her friend of nearly two decades — they were both 40 at the time — to keep a diary of one day in his life and to narrate it into her tape recorder. This wasn’t her first foray into real-life documentation. For her dishy 1968 book, “Talk,” she’d taped countless hours of conversations with two friends in East Hampton, N.Y., during the summer of 1965, transcribed the dialogue, then edited the resulting thousand-plus typed pages into a “fictional nonfiction book,” as the editor and writer Leo Lerman once called it. “Talk” gamely and wittily ranged among many thorny subjects (love, art, money, psychoanalysis, sex), suggesting that unfettered intimacy between friends can be a radical act. Rosenkrantz’s next project, in which she asked the artist Chuck Close, her cleaning woman and a handful of others to participate, was just as ingenious in its lying-in-plain-sight simplicity: She hoped to illuminate — through the public act of talking about what usually remains private — the quotidian texture of people’s lives, demystifying the elusive reality of how they spend their days.
Hujar, then known mostly for documenting New York’s queer bohemian demimonde, chose to narrate Dec. 18, 1974. At the time, Manhattan was on the brink of economic collapse. Yet it was nonetheless alive with possibility for the adventurous young people who lived in its crumbling buildings and abandoned warehouses. As the singer and poet Lydia Lunch has said, “New York at that moment was bankrupt, poor, dirty, violent, drug-infested, sex-obsessed — delightful.”
This is the city Hujar evokes as he describes a day spent hustling to make a living as a freelance photographer. A mesmerizing raconteur, he tells Rosenkrantz — whose East 94th Street apartment is the site of the monologue’s unspooling — how he wakes up late, meets with an Elle editor who has come to retrieve pictures from his studio-loft on Second Avenue and East 12th Street, then sets out for the Lower East Side to photograph Allen Ginsberg. “He sat down in the lotus position, looking very Buddha, right in the doorway, and started to chant,” Hujar says of the Beat poet, with whom he does not connect. “And I really thought, ‘Well, I can’t interrupt God.’” Back in his studio, Hujar develops the photos (“He gave out nothing,” he tells Rosenkrantz), then works on some other jobs. He also naps, runs out for groceries and Chinese food and gets interrupted by frequent phone calls from friends (among them the writers Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz and Vince Aletti, who asks to come over and shower) whose iconic portraits he would shoot the following year for his 1976 monograph, “Portraits in Life and Death” — the only book he published in his lifetime.
Thirteen years later, in 1987, Hujar would die at 53 of AIDS-related complications, and the transcript chronicling a mundane day in his younger life would acquire new significance. Rosenkrantz’s project, it turned out, didn’t only capture Hujar’s wry, uncompromising sensibility for the ages: It became a time capsule of sorts, a vivid narrative of a queer artist living and working in the heady, comparatively freer days before AIDS killed a generation of his peers.
This essential record might never have resurfaced. But in the late 2010s, more than 30 years after Hujar’s death, Rosenkrantz, then in her mid-80s and living in Los Angeles, was rummaging in a file cabinet when she found the typewritten document she and her late friend had collaborated on almost a half-century earlier. She donated it to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where Hujar’s papers, more than 160 of his prints and nearly 6,000 of his black-and-white contact sheets are held.
Enter fate. Or luck. Or, as I half came to suspect in the course of reporting this story, the mystical assistance of Hujar’s ghost. Not long after Rosenkrantz donated the transcript, a young art historian named Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez encountered it while doing research in the Morgan’s Peter Hujar Collection and passed it on to the photographer and publisher Jordan Weitzman, who loved it so much he tacked it up on his studio wall with vague plans to turn it into a book someday. There it hung for two years, until Weitzman’s business and romantic partner, Francis Schichtel, who had worked scanning images for the Peter Hujar Archive, went to meet Rosenkrantz for lunch in Los Angeles. He floated the possibility of publishing the document and, by 2021, Weitzman’s imprint, Magic Hour Press, had put out “Peter Hujar’s Day.”
That fall, the director Ira Sachs discovered the book at Les Mots à la Bouche, the historic L.G.B.T.Q. bookstore in Paris, where he was filming his romantic drama “Passages” (2023). Sachs was so moved by “Peter Hujar’s Day” that he resolved to ask Ben Whishaw, 44, then co-starring in “Passages,” if he wanted to “make an art project” together. The two men share not only “a great passion for and curiosity about queer artistic history,” says Sachs, 59, but a particular interest in Hujar’s work: Whishaw owns one of the photographer’s self-portraits from 1980 (known as “Seated Self-Portrait Depressed”), in which a somber, darkly handsome Hujar sits naked in a chair. The film they made, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” starring Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall, 43, as Rosenkrantz, opens next month and is surprisingly faithful to Hujar’s original telling, preserving all of his precision and humor.
Hujar’s fame has been growing for several years now: The Morgan organized a 2017 show of his photos, “Speed of Life,” that traveled to four countries; Liveright reprinted “Portraits in Life and Death” last year and will publish a biography by John Douglas Millar, “Nude Opera: A Life of Peter Hujar,” in 2029. But the movie is sure to help usher Hujar’s obliquely beautiful, technically rigorous work further into the mainstream, securing his rightful place alongside his more celebrated peers — Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin — in the pantheon of 20th-century photographers.
It will also introduce the broader public to Linda Rosenkrantz. Over the course of an eclectic career that has spanned more than 50 years, her interest in talk, conversation, gossip, names and words — in language itself — has taken many forms: In addition to “Talk” and “Peter Hujar’s Day,” she has published a 1999 memoir, “My Life as a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood”; 10 books about baby names (written with Pamela Redmond), including 1994’s best-selling “Beyond Jennifer & Jason”; and a short 2003 history called “Telegram!,” told through more than 400 examples of the outmoded messaging form. She is currently at work on “Ex,” a compendium of conversations with past boyfriends recorded over dinners at her apartment in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
While she was Hujar’s dear friend (he once wrote to her, “You are my only real sweetheart”) and perhaps his most-documented photographic subject — Rosenkrantz says there are more than a thousand extant photos of her — their friendship was essential to her work, too. Indeed, as both the book and film make clear, the shared dialogue that bound them together in life has continued, through their art, into the present, nearly four decades after Hujar’s death. What speaking with Rosenkrantz over several months revealed to me is that for every well-known artist who dies, especially those who die tragically young, there is a friend, a writer, a tender of the flame, maybe an executor, who has kept the memory of that artist alive. “No matter who you are, whether Peter Hujar or Robert Rauschenberg, if no one is there to mind the story, you are going to be forgotten,” says the writer Stephen Koch, 84, the executor of the Hujar estate. And the role of the minder is, in its unassuming way, as important as — and perhaps more noble than — that of the star whose name is in lights. One could argue that Rosenkrantz, a temperamentally modest person who turned her gift for close listening into a career, has wholeheartedly embraced that role, almost as if it were a calling. As I looked at the photos Hujar took of her, I realized that the photographer, who always had a sense of his own destiny — “He thought, ‘Well, I’ll be successful after I die,’” Koch says — knew that Rosenkrantz would play a critical part in preserving his legacy.
IN LATE APRIL, a month before I meet Rosenkrantz for the first time, she emails me the author photo Hujar shot of her for the 1968 publication of “Talk.” When I open it on my laptop, a black-and-white image of a soulful beauty with dark flipped hair appears. “I bear no resemblance to that woman! I hope you don’t go into shock!” Rosenkrantz writes in her self-deprecating manner. “I’m not even sure I looked like that then. Transformed by Peter’s love.”
When I arrive at her Santa Monica apartment, she materializes at the front door wearing black pants, a black T-shirt printed with the image of a white typewriter and baby pink Converse sneakers. It’s the day after her 91st birthday, and a vase of yellow flowers sent by a friend sits on the coffee table. “I certainly don’t feel that age,” she says. “Or even 90.” Her outfit, banged bob — dyed the color of a red velvet cupcake — and impish demeanor all lend her the aura of someone much younger.
For the past two years, she’s lived in this stucco one-bedroom set off a small courtyard planted with an orange tree and a lavender bush. Her daughter, Chloe Finch, 50, lives in a unit upstairs. In 2022, Rosenkrantz’s husband of nearly 50 years, Christopher Finch, the Guernsey-born writer, critic and painter, passed away after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Rosenkrantz subsequently vacated the house they’d rented for 25 years in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. (They moved to Los Angeles in 1990 so a teenage Chloe could attend a school for dyslexic students.) Although Rosenkrantz, who was born and raised in the Bronx, has lived in Los Angeles for a third of her life, she says she misses New York terribly. “I regret leaving,” she admits. “I think it was definitely a mistake to have left.”
After a brief stint in an assisted living facility (“I hated it. It’s activities and things — writing groups with these old ladies about their memoirs …”), she found her current apartment. But Rosenkrantz, who “saves everything,” as she tells me, remains unsettled by the move. She has become a de facto archivist and memory bank — not only for Hujar and her late husband but for a glamorous New York art scene of the past and the friends who inhabited it — and she’s lacking a lot of her touchstones. “So much stuff didn’t come with me,” she says with a sigh. “Every day, I discover something I don’t have.” In the course of our interviews, she mentions missing particular letters, her husband’s paintings, his old London appointment books (“where he was having lunch with Hockney one day, Bacon the next”) and her original “Talk” manuscript: the relics of a long, productive life spent at the center of art and culture — and much of it now in storage.
Still, we sit on a pale pink couch and look through several fabric-covered boxes containing photographs, letters, newspaper clippings and mementos. On the wall above us hangs a small collection of framed black-and-white photos, all shot by Hujar. There’s Rosenkrantz and her soignée mother, Frances, with her meringue-like blond bouffant; Rosenkrantz tells me she lived to be 100. There’s Rosenkrantz’s best friend, the artist and filmmaker Susan Brockman, who died of lung cancer in 2001 — she was Willem de Kooning’s companion for a time, Rosenkrantz says — reclining in a patch of grass. There’s Rosenkrantz and Finch (she in a long, black, spiderwebby poncho, her dark hair permed; he in a plaid shirt and blazer) standing in Central Park.
I ask Rosenkrantz how it feels to be one of the few remaining survivors among her group of artist friends. “I guess I feel privileged — lucky,” she says. “But it’s also depressing.” After a moment, she adds, “This happens to everybody when they get to be 90. They don’t have that many surviving friends.”
Yet through photos and artifacts, Hujar’s presence is palpable. He and Rosenkrantz met in 1956, not long after she graduated from the University of Michigan, where she was an English major in the same class as the journalist Janet Malcolm. Hujar had moved in with one of her closest friends, the painter Joseph Raffael. Rosenkrantz recalls spending many evenings at the couple’s “immaculate” Upper West Side apartment, with its “antique wooden clock on [the] wall” and its “bookcase chock-full of books,” the whole place teeming with music and art and plants, all of it presided over by their large gray cat, Alice B. Toklas. The threesome would sit around analyzing Rosenkrantz’s love life or gossiping about her co-workers at Parke-Bernet Galleries, the auction house where she’d been hired in the editorial and public relations department. “[We] talked about them endlessly,” Rosenkrantz says of the office characters, “all these old people who worked at Parke-Bernet. They wanted to know everything about them.” (In 1967, she turned the company’s house organ into Auction Magazine, which she edited for five years.)
We unearth a cache of letters Rosenkrantz and Hujar wrote to each other in 1958, while he was in Florence, Italy, where Raffael was on a Fulbright scholarship, and she was working on Madison Avenue. “Oh, it’s all complaining about my life,” she says with a sheepish laugh when I ask if I can look at them. A letter dated only “1 a.m. Saturday night” reads: “I was sitting in my doctor’s office last night and suddenly I looked at him and realized that I felt no contact with him, or with anyone else, the whole thing seemed so pointless; my whole life, going to that flunky job every day, eating a lonely hamburger at night and sitting here like an ugly 65-year-old librarian old maid, imprisoning myself with my goddamned lists and Christmas cards, hungering after that lunatic I’m not even interested in, washing my hair, cooking.” Raffael and Hujar eventually invited her to come stay at the ancient stone villino they’d rented in Bellosguardo, in the hills overlooking Florence. “We wrote and painted by day and talked endlessly of matters high and low at night,” Rosenkrantz has written about what she calls “one of the most enchanted periods of [her] life.”
We come upon a stack of photos taken by Hujar at Rosenkrantz’s 1973 wedding — the photographer’s gift to his friend. There’s one of Rosenkrantz and Finch at City Hall; she holds the bouquet as he slides the ring onto her finger. By all accounts, the couple — who lived together first uptown in her apartment; then in the West Village; then in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill — had an ideal marriage. “They set the bar high for me because they never argued,” says Chloe, whom the couple adopted as a baby in 1975. “Up until my dad died, they would sit on the couch together, arm in arm, watching movies.”
Rosenkrantz tells me she was Hujar’s “touch with a domestic life” and believes that this partly accounts for their bond. In that era, the gay and straight worlds were more separate than they are today; Rosenkrantz and her husband were among Hujar’s few more bourgeois friends. “He would come over for dinner or on his way to cruise on the West Side,” Rosenkrantz says. “I don’t think he went anywhere else with a family.” Hujar and Finch also became close, and Hujar developed an avuncular relationship with Chloe. He photographed her, at age 7, bouncing a tennis ball — one of his most tender and memorable images — and gave the photo to Rosenkrantz as a gift, inscribing it “To Ma and Pa Finch.”
ON A TABLE beneath the big-screen TV where Rosenkrantz likes to watch “things like ‘The Kardashians’ and ‘Project Runway’” sits an assemblage of unframed Hujar photos. Among them is a large group shot that includes Rosenkrantz, Eva Hesse, Frederic Tuten and Paul Thek, along with other New York art world denizens. The documentary filmmaker Mark Obenhaus, a more peripheral member of this crowd, tells me he was fascinated by “the kind of intimacy they had,” a sort he’d never previously witnessed: “They could talk about anything, absolutely anything — and did. Together, one-on-one, on the phone.”
Talk among friends is Rosenkrantz’s main passion. “Realizing how gossipy my work is,” she writes, in one of hundreds of emails she sends me in the months after we meet. This is why she loves Instagram, she says: “It’s a gossip thing.” Not gossip in the malicious or trash-talking sense; rather, in the sense the writer Elizabeth Hardwick meant when she told The Paris Review in 1985, “Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis.”
Rosenkrantz might most accurately be called an artist working in the medium of human speech. She treats language as a found object. In a piece she wrote the same year she interviewed Hujar, “Late ’74 on the Phone,” she arranged snippets of conversations with friends (“But I ignored you less than I did most people last night”; “All those ’50s art writer types have broken blood vessels in their noses”), collagelike, into a deconstructed essay. More than once, Rosenkrantz says that what she’s doing “is not writing, exactly.” Though I disagree with her — her letters, like her memoir, are sharp, funny and beautifully rendered — it’s true that in her best-known works, what she’s doing is noticing, shaping and editing patterns of speech.
Her fascination with language dates back to childhood. Sifting through mementos, we find her yearbook from New York’s High School of Music and Art (a.k.a. the “Fame” school). Her senior quote is an excerpt from Elinor Wylie’s poem “Pretty Words,” first published in 1932: “I love words opalescent, cool and pearly / Like midsummer moths, and honied words, like bees / Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.” Her obsession with names took root even earlier. Though her birth certificate reads Ruth Leila, she was known by her Jewish name, Laila, so when her kindergarten teacher called her Ruth, she has written, her “identity was shattered.” In her quirky memoir, “My Life as a List,” she recounts her mother allowing her to “choose a completely new name” and enumerating for her a number of options that started with her initials “R” and “L.” Rosenkrantz “chose Linda, because it sounded so much shinier and more modern than all others,” she writes, without realizing that it would soon “become the most popular girl’s name in America.” The experience, as she puts it, triggered her “lifelong fascination with names” and led to her “becoming a compulsive, lifelong listmaker.”
Rosenkrantz’s ear for spoken language is on dazzling display in “Talk,” where the repartee among three friends (Rosenkrantz is Marsha, Raffael is Vincent and the actress Nancy Fish is Emily) follows the texture of actual conversation, in all its hilarity and strangeness. The trio slalom from topic to topic: One moment, someone is soliloquizing about love; the next they’re bantering about the art world, then wondering if raisins are fattening. “I’m beginning to feel very alone here,” Vincent says. “These peaches were not washed, I can feel the dirt on each one.” As they lie on the beach or cook dinner together, their chatter moves among registers, high and low, sacred and profane, cerebral and corporeal. “No performance, nothing; it was real chemistry between the three of us,” says Fish, who has chosen to remain anonymous all these years because, as she says, “I didn’t want my embarrassingly open mind to be public.” (When I ask if she cares if I name her, Fish, now 90 and living at the Motion Picture Home for retired members of the film industry in Woodland Hills, says, “That would be embarrassing if I did.”)
Reading the book can feel voyeuristic, like eavesdropping on a private group-therapy session. Because the dialogue is honest and searching but also raw (Emily: “He must have a beautiful little penis”), the book was controversial. We look through the yellowed clippings Rosenkrantz has saved, laughing at the headlines. “In Talkathon They Tear Selves Limb to Limb,” reads one. “Which Was Your Favorite Abortion?,” reads another. And my favorite: “Three Swingers Probe Libidos.” We find a note from Harvey Ginsberg, her editor at Putnam: “Herewith the reviews so far. As predicted, they either love you or they hate you.”
In 2015, New York Review Books republished “Talk” after it had spent decades out of print, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. “Rosenkrantz captures the psychodrama of all-consuming friendship with an honesty that qualifies as its own kind of boldness,” Judy Berman wrote in The Guardian. The culture had finally caught up with Rosenkrantz’s Warholian premise — reality television is ubiquitous, nearly everyone is starring as the main character of their own social-media feed and the nonfiction novel has been heralded as autofiction. Yet what’s remarkable about “Talk” is Rosenkrantz’s almost total lack of solipsism. She was not the protagonist but the observer, the chronicler of a social scene, a conduit for other people. She allowed her subjects to express themselves without judgment, shame or embarrassment — a freedom that, in our censorious moment, seems revolutionary.
ALTHOUGH HE WAS primarily known as a portrait artist, Hujar photographed a variety of subjects: nudes; animals; the New York cityscape; catacombs in Palermo, Italy. But even when capturing a copse of bare silvery trees, a lone cow or the Hopperesque glow of a gas station by night, his photographs possess the stillness and fundamental solitude of portraits. “The signature move in his art is to lavish a portraitist’s attention upon a subject that defies it,” Joel Smith, the photography curator at the Morgan, has written.
This is also his signature move in “Peter Hujar’s Day,” in which the photographer’s verbal recollection amounts to a self-portrait of sorts. “It’s like he’s translating what his photography does into words, both allowing himself to be a subject and making himself a subject at the same time,” says Andrew Durbin, 36, the author of a forthcoming biography of Hujar and Thek, “The Wonderful World That Almost Was.”
But Hujar’s freewheeling account of his day as a working artist also paints a portrait of a city — the “lost world,” as the writer and translator Benjamin Moser has written, of downtown New York — that, with the specter of AIDS looming, was on the cusp of devastating social change no one could have anticipated. In Sachs’s film, the mid-70s city is itself a character. Sachs met with Rosenkrantz in Los Angeles, perused her stash of old photos and loosely modeled the set after her former apartment, with its potted plants and French doors. The two characters move around this compact space, from dining room to kitchen to bedroom to rooftop, talking, talking, talking some more, while outside horns honk and truck brakes sigh.
Above all, the film is a portrait of a friendship, one that existed in an age when relationships were conducted in person or by phone. Seeing the actors inhabit the characters underscores the collaborative nature not just of their project but of their relationship: Rosenkrantz listens, asks questions, draws Hujar out. To prepare for the role, Hall spoke to Rosenkrantz by phone, and even recorded her talking so she could approximate her Bronx accent. “I wanted to get a sense of her voice,” says Hall. “I wanted the stories.” But as she tells it, Rosenkrantz began “deflecting immediately off of anything to do with her and started being like, ‘What’s the name of your child? And why did you choose that name?’” She laughs, then adds: “She is just by nature a curious listener. And there’s a quiet heroism in that.”
The same is true in the film as well. “OK, so is it boring?” Hujar asks about a third of the way into the interview, after exhaustively telling his friend how much money he’s owed for various photo jobs.
“No,” Rosenkrantz says. “It’s not boring at all to me.”
The post The Writer Who Turned Gossip Into Art appeared first on New York Times.
