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.”’
There is one photograph that has had a profound effect on me. It’s by Peter Hujar of a man with an erect penis, called Seated Nude, Bruce de Sainte Croix from 1976. I saw it the first time I came to NYC in a small group show, and I had never seen nudity and sexuality shown with such grace and objectivity.
Masculinity, and its many complex and contradictory iterations, will take centre stage in a new exhibition opening at The Barbican in February. Masculinities: Liberation through Photography will include the work of over 50 photographers and filmmakers from the 1960s through today – from Kenneth Anger, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz to Laurie Anderson, Collier Schorr and Rineke Dijkstra. Each of the featured works serves to debunk or disrupt the myths surrounding modern masculinity in some way, while exploring how masculinity is “experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed”. The show will be divided into six sections, tackling themes of queer identity, the black body, power and patriarchy, female perceptions of men, heteronormative hypermasculine stereotypes, fatherhood and family.