Stephen Koch, a writer and critic who tirelessly shepherded the works of an overlooked photographer, Peter Hujar, to global prominence, establishing Mr. Hujar as one of his art form’s greats, died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
His death, from a heart attack, was announced by the Peter Hujar Archive, a group dedicated to promoting the photographer’s work. Mr. Koch was its longtime director.
Such an organization would have been unthinkable at the time of Mr. Hujar’s death from AIDS, at 53, in 1987. During his lifetime, Mr. Hujar could barely afford to do his laundry, and his work was shown infrequently.
Known largely to cognoscenti — including Susan Sontag, who wrote the introduction to his first book, in 1976, and her protégé Mr. Koch, who first met him at Ms. Sontag’s apartment — Mr. Hujar was an unusually penetrating chronicler of New York’s downtown gay scene in the 1970s and ’80s.
But in recent years, his soulful black-and-white pictures of shadowy streetscapes and his friends and lovers — some famous, some not, most from the Lower Manhattan bohemia he inhabited — have sold at auction for as much as $250,000. Holland Cotter of The New York Times declared in 2018 that Mr. Hujar was “one of the major American photographers of the late 20th century.”
That his reputation has reached such heights is in large part because of Mr. Koch.
“I think a big part of Peter’s posthumous success is due to how unrestrictive Stephen was about how writers and critics and historians looked at and accessed the photographs,” Andrew Durbin, the author of “The Wonderful World That Almost Was,” a forthcoming book about Mr. Hujar and the artist Paul Thek, said in an email. “He never imposed his own view; he courted and enjoyed different perspectives. In my experience, that’s pretty rare for an estate.”
Mr. Hujar’s friend and champion, Mr. Koch was also a writer who by the late 1980s had published a pair of neglected novels, a study of Andy Warhol’s films and numerous articles. (An early review of Ms. Sontag’s work had caught her eye.)
On a hot July day in 1987, Mr. Koch visited Mr. Hujar at the photographer’s austere loft at Second Avenue and East 12th Street. Mr. Hujar knew he was going to die soon and wanted his friend to accompany him to the hospital.
Mr. Koch recounted what happened next in a moving 2018 article in Harper’s Magazine.
After Mr. Hujar slowly bade farewell to the objects in his apartment — “Goodbye, bed,” he said gently — he turned to Mr. Koch and said, “I have decided that you should have the pictures.”
“You’re no good,” the acerbic Mr. Hujar added. “But you’re the best I have.”
Becoming the executor of the photographer’s artistic estate changed Mr. Koch’s life. Following Mr. Hujar’s death that fall, he began a long mission to “usher his art into posthumous fame,” as he put it in Harper’s. He relentlessly badgered galleries, dealers and museums, at first to little avail.
An early breakthrough, not long after Mr. Hujar died, came when Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Hujar’s far more famous downtown rival, paid $500 for a now-celebrated photograph of a horse. A couple of years later, Richard Avedon, another star photographer, impulsively agreed to hang a Hujar show, though the idea eventually came to naught. In 1994, retrospectives were mounted in Amsterdam and Winterthur, Switzerland.
“Peter’s star was finally on the rise,” Mr. Koch wrote in Harper’s.
“The poorest adult I had ever known,” he said, “had transformed me into what I had never even wanted to be: a rather successful small-business man.”
Until Mr. Hujar’s bequest, Mr. Koch’s professional life had been a series of hits and misses. He had achieved some notoriety with “Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films” (1973), a bemused exploration, influenced by the literary theory of the time, of Warhol’s exotic entourage and cryptic art.
“Andy Warhol is a remarkably talented and interesting man who, in his whole public lifetime, has had one, and only one, really interesting idea,” Mr. Koch wrote. “That these pictures sometimes play with banality is entirely secondary to what their images do with power.”
But he later partly disavowed his earlier focus on Warhol, telling an interviewer in 2004, “The last artist I would suggest young people turn to now would be Andy.” He added, “The one gift Andy lacked as an artist, and he lacked it absolutely, was a narrative gift.”
Mr. Koch’s novels, like his nonfiction, received mixed reviews. Of “The Bachelor’s Bride” (1986), a satirical look at the New York art scene of the 1960s and ’70s through the eyes of an art historian, the author Elizabeth Fishel wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Mr. Koch’s “intellectual playfulness can be charming.”
She added, though, that “the narrative at times runs wild with its own wit” and criticized one “long and tedious diatribe.”
But in the art of Mr. Hujar, Mr. Koch found a mission, and an ideal.
“His photographs were stunning, often upsetting, unpredictably beautiful, distinctively his,” Mr. Koch wrote, adding that Mr. Hujar believed “that the camera could reveal things that were invisible to the naked eye.”
Stephen Bayard Koch was born on May 8, 1941, in St. Paul, Minn., the younger of two sons of Robert and Edith (Bayard) Koch, and grew up in Northfield, Minn. His father was a lawyer. Stephen received a bachelor’s degree from City College in New York in 1962 and a master’s in 19th-century American literature from Columbia in 1965.
Starting in the 1960s, he wrote reviews and essays for The New Republic, The Nation, The Times Book Review and other publications. He began teaching in the writing program at Columbia in 1977 and remained there for 21 years, six of them as the program’s chairman. He also taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and at Princeton.
Mr. Koch’s book “Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals” (1994), about the cultural influence in Europe of a notorious operative of Stalin’s, was criticized for mixing fact with speculation.
“Mr. Koch reduces history to conspiracy, and conspiracy to caricature,” the historian Maurice Isserman wrote in The Times Book Review. In response, Mr. Koch claimed in a letter to the editor that the review was “filled with inaccurate reporting and incompetent scholarship.”
He also wrote “Hitler’s Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust” (2019), about Herschel Grynszpan, whose killing of a German diplomat was used by the Nazis as a pretext for Kristallnacht; “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of José Robles” (2005), about the friendship between those two American novelists and the killing of a friend of Dos Passos’, a Spanish writer and activist, during the Spanish Civil War; and “The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction” (2003), a writing guide.
Mr. Koch is survived by his daughter, Angelica Madeline Koch, and two grandchildren. His wife, Frances Cohen, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, died in 2021. An earlier marriage, to Sheila Shulman, ended in divorce.
In later years, Mr. Koch reflected, somewhat wistfully, on how Mr. Hujar had achieved fame while he had not.
“Peter is much better known than I am, much,” he told an interviewer on the podcast “Magic Hour” in 2021. “But I helped make that happen.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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