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.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post Linda Rosenkrantz Made Art Out of Talk. Decades On, We’re Still Listening. appeared first on New York Times.
