Book Release: April 2021

The Shabbiness of Beauty
Moyra Davey & Peter Hujar

The Shabbiness of Beauty is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City – even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania – these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work.

Embossed printed hardback
17 x 24cm, 128 pages
ISBN 978-1-913620-20-2
April 2021

mackbooks.co.ukhttps://mackbooks.co.uk/products/the-shabbiness-of-beauty-br-moyra-davey-peter-hujar

The Cockettes – 2020

Remembering the Cockettes, Trailblazing, Trendsetting 1970s Drag Queens

After electrifying San Francisco with their gender-bending performances and wild psychedelic chic, the group trekked to New York for a much-hyped—and ill-fated—East Coast debut. A new book bears witness to their brief, glittery glory. – Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair

https://thecockettes.net/

AnOther – July 2020

Peter Hujar’s Illicit Photographs of New York’s Cruising Utopia


Peter Hujar, Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976 © The Peter Hujar Archive

In a new online exhibition, we are confronted with two Hujars: the studio photographer who captured his community; and the flaneur who cruised New York’s West Side

TEXT: Osman Can Yerebakan

https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/12659/peter-hujar-s-cruising-utopia-pace-gallery-exhibition