Peter Hujar’s Illicit Photographs of New York’s Cruising Utopia
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
Peter Hujar: the legacy, life, and loves of the bohemian photographer
Peter Hujar Foundation director and friend Stephen Koch reflects on the photographer’s illustrious career and tense friendships with Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus
Does the Barbican’s Masculinities exhibition have important things to say about men?
For once, it’s the normative male who gets poked and prodded as a curiosity in this female-curated photography exhibition, and it may provoke bullish defensiveness among some. It forces Mark Hudson to look at himself
‘Peter Hujar met poet and visual artist David Wojnarowicz in 1980, a year before he made this portrait in his East Village studio. When I look at this picture, which was recently on show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, I see the love between two people, both estranged from their birth families, left to build their own families within their marginalised community.
Peter Hujar: David Wojnarowicz Reclining (II), 1981. Vintage gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in (50.8 × 40.6 cm). Courtesy Peter Hujar Archive, Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Fraenkel Gallery
‘Wojnarowicz was diagnosed with AIDS shortly after Hujar’s own AIDS-related death in 1987. In an interview Wojnarowicz once said, “Everything I made, I made for Peter.”’