In the rare self-portraits showing the photographer at home, Peter Hujar’s East Village loft strikes the eye as a rather solitary space, with the lone lensman cast adrift – literally, in one case – amid the flat’s sparse holdings. But don’t rely on snap impressions: in fact, says Will Ferreira Dyke, the pad played host to myriad meet-ups and tender shots of his starry milieu.
By Will Ferreira Dyke published 27 March 2025 for The World of Interiors
“When I think of Peter Hujar’s work, one image leaps – both figuratively and literally – to mind: a 1974 self-portrait, where the artist is caught mid-flight in his East Village loft. There’s an uncanniness to this image. Beautiful, yet utterly bizarre. In the middle of the frame, in the middle of his apartment, Hujar is suspended hailing a militant salute. Despite his near-balletic pose, his shirt remains creaseless, neatly tucked into non-stretch denim. Hujar’s stillness is undermined by the shabbiness of his surroundings. The floor is scuffed, the rugs dishevelled and the walls still half-painted. This once grubby loft, located at 189 Second Avenue, has since given way to luxury apartments in a post-gentrified Manhattan. But in the 1970s it was filled by the milieu of subcultural refusal.
Perched atop the former Eden Theatre, the loft boasts an impressive lineage of underground tenants. Hujar moved in during the 1970s, when artists started to inhabit the crumbling, crime-infested, arson-prone Big Apple. During this time, the idea of a chic downtown was unthinkable to the artists, poets, off-Broadway performers and drag queens who called it home. Hujar took over the occupancy from Jackie Curtis, the performer and Andy Warhol ‘superstar’ celebrated in the Lou Reed song Walk on the Wild Side.
After his premature Aids-related death in 1987, Hujar left the loft to his dear friend and fleeting lover, the artist David Wojnarowicz, who lived there for the remaining five years of his unjustly abbreviated life. He too died from Aids, in 1992, at the age of 37.
A decade earlier, in 1982, Wojnarowicz painted his now-famous cow motif in the intersection of East 12th Street and Second Avenue for Hujar’s amusement. It could be seen from the loft’s beautifully arched, albeit curtainless, sash windows, which wrap around the building. While no definitive floor plan exists, contact sheets from Hujar’s archive at the Morgan Library hint at its arrangement. These thumbnails show a charming, high-ceilinged, almost grand apartment that today would fetch an inconceivable price. The loft was filled with mismatched furniture: a daybed and, by the largest window, both a piano and a harpsichord; a self-portrait tacked to the wall and a lit cigarette in the ashtray.
Hujar didn’t just inhabit the space; rather, it was the very nexus of his artistic output. He used it not only as a studio to capture his intimate portraits but also to create them, in his in-built darkroom. From conception to production, it all happened in the loft. All stages of the cross, cradle through grave. In an interview, he explained how he used ‘the same wall, the same floor’ in his photographs, but that in each image ‘the place is different […] it’s a whole different time [and] temperature’. Hujar’s apartment served as the backdrop, scenery and stage for his tender portraits of friends in repose, including Paul Thek, Fran Lebowitz, Cookie Mueller, Vince Aletti and Susan Sontag. Twenty years senior to most of his contemporaries, he was considered a pied piper to this subculture. Virtually everybody in the East Village would have spent time at his blue kitchen table, the corner of which is detectable on the contact sheet thumbnails.” – Will Ferreira Dyke