Eyes Open in the Dark is the first survey to take on works from the American photographer’s later oeuvre. Will Ferreira Dyke zooms in on three images that trace a singular kinship.
Published by Ocula Magazine, 14 February 2025
“While no photographic evidence exists of the first encounter between Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992)—only anecdotes from a gay bar in downtown Manhattan—numerous images of the two artists can be seen in an exhibition at Raven Row in London. Eyes Open in the Dark, a survey of Hujar’s later work co-curated by his close friend and master printer Gary Schneider, his biographer John Douglas Millar, and gallery director Alex Sainsbury, features 130 prints including eight newly printed, never-before-seen works.
The show foregrounds intimacy and artistry across subjects that range from lustful cruising piers and skylines to tender and playful portraits of animals and personalities of 1970s New York. Three prints—Self-Portrait (1975), David Wojnarowicz (II) (1981), and Dead Gull (1985)—eloquently attest to Hujar and Wojnarowicz’s profound bond. “
“In the mid-eighties, Hujar and Wojnarowicz would visit desolate sites in New Jersey. During one exploration through an abandoned railway yard, Wojnarowicz found a lifeless gull. Lifting it up by its wings, he turned to Peter with a grin before positioning the bird for Hujar’s lens. The resulting Dead Gull invokes Albrecht Dürer‘s watercolour Wing of a European Roller (1512), a print of which Hujar kept above a mirror in his loft, and later by his hospital bed as he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Standing beside Hujar in the hospital, Wojnarowicz described, ‘This body of my friend on the bed, the body of my brother, my father, my emotional link to the world.’ He designed Hujar’s gravestone with his name, dates, and a reproduction of the Dürer wing.”