The Wild and the Tragic Years
The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn presents captivating black-and-white photographs by Peter Hujar
By Thomas Kliemann published February 26, 2026 in General–Anzeiger Bonn
It is a true symphony of powerful gazes and intimate glimpses, of observations that are never casual, but rather capture moments from the life of the US photographer Peter Hujar in stark, stark black and white. With his portraits of friends and lovers, the people who flanked his everyday life in the clubs, on the stages, and on the streets of downtown Manhattan, Hujar retrospectively became a chronicler of the 1970s and 1980s. He himself did not aspire to this. The refined and, at heart, apolitical aesthete could not, however, as a photographer and part of the scene, avoid registering the socio-political urgency of the emerging gay rights movement and with, great empathy, capturing the incredible tragedy that AIDS brought with it in melancholic images.
In the exhibition “Eyes Open in the Dark” at the Bundeskunsthalle, Hujar accompanies the lively street parties of the queer community at the West Side Piers with his camera on Easter Sunday 1976 and photographs his ex-lover, the dancer Bruce de Sainte Croix, naked. First as the epitome of youthful innocence and vulnerability like Michelangelo’s “David”, then sitting and preoccupied with his erection, finally kneeling in masturbation: a triptych with which Hujar and Sainte Croix move into a “forbidden zone” of male nude photography, as Sainte Croix admits in an interview (the exhibition is recommended for ages 18 and up).
A few years later, the mood shifted abruptly: with the first AIDS diagnoses and the first deaths in the scene, Hujar’s visual world darkened. In January 1987, he was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease. At the end of the year, he died of AIDS-related pneumonia. “23 photos of Peter. 23 genes in one chromosome. Room 1423” reads an envelope containing contact prints made by his former lover, David Wojnarowicz, of his deceased friend. Three very powerful studies from the series are on display in the Bonn exhibition. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992; the painter Paul Thek, one of the most influential people in the photographer’s life succumbed to the disease six months after Hujar. In Room 1423, Hujar had photographed the dying Candy Darling—a star from Andy Warhol’s Factory—in 1974.
The exhibition begins with juxtaposition of all of Hujar’s thematic areas: a woman’s shoe (for Elizabeth) and a dead cat, the portrait of actor and editor of the magazine “Gay Power,” John Heys, a urinating stranger, a discarded carpet, a New York backyard and parking spaces, drag star John Flowers on the toilet, or Richie Gallo in an S&M costume on the sidelines of the production “The Life & Times of Joseph Stalin.” Hujar himself is said to have appreciated this type of presentation. He called it “Grid.” He practiced the principle in the underground newspaper “Newspaper” as well as in his last exhibition. Hujar wanted to create the associative leaps that exciting juxtapositions enable.
“Eyes Open in the Dark” is a captivating, fast-paced, breathtaking, and atmospheric kaleidoscope of the New York scene, further charged by the intensity of the gazes. There are Butch and Buster, fixing the viewer with their eyes, Cookie Meuller gazing into the distance with bedroom eyes, and baby John McClellan blinking in the camera. The writer William Burroughs, in a boldly patterned outfit, gazes up sadly from his plaid blanket, and the publicist Susan Sontag broods over something with her arms folded behind her head.
Butch and Buster, by the way, are two cows that Hujar photographed in Westtown New York. Throughout his life, Hujar also felt connected to that sphere. After all, the photographer, born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, had grown up on the farm of his Galician-Ukrainian grandparents before his mother, Rose, moved to Manhattan with Peter in 1945. Hujar’s youth was marked by alcoholism, verbal and physical violence. He studied photography, received important inspiration on a trip to Italy, and through contact with neorealist directors such as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, through Paul Thek, the writers Linda Rosenkrantz and Susan Sontag, he came into contact with intellectual circles. For a long lime. Hujar was considered an insider tip in Germany — after all, Klaus Honnef showed photographs by Hujar in his 1982 exhibition “Lichtbildnisse” (Portraits) at the Rheinisches Landesmuscum Bonn. However, his work is currently experiencing a true renaissance. In addition to “Eyes Open in the Dark” in Bonn, in cooperation with Raven Row, London, and the Hujar Foundation, the Gropius Bau in Berlin is also celebrating the photographer simultaneously, together with the New York painter Liz Deschenes. Last autumn, Ira Sachs brought his sensitive portrait “Peter Hujar’s Day” to cinemas. Ben Whishaw plays the photographer. The film is based on a 1974 tape interview. In it, he recounts how he photographed Allen Ginsberg on the Lower East Side. The Beat Generation star was sitting in the lotus position in a doorway and began to sing. Hujar was disturbed: “May God interrupt me?”
(This article has been translated from the original German.)
“Eyes Open in the Dark” will be exhibited at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany from February 27–August 23, 2026. See exhibition details.