Peter Hujar: Rialto
This unique exhibition catalogue, published with Rodovid Press in Kyiv in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum, provides new insights into the seminal and lesser- known aspects of Peter Hujar’s career, living and working in the Ukrainian Village. The exhibition explores the first fifteen years of Hujar’s professional career. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way.
The lushly illustrated publication features 77 photographs, some never seen or published. Three important interviews with Hujar’s closest friends and colleagues, plus a scholarly essay on his work with the photographer Richard Avedon, chronicle Hujar’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life in the East Village of New York.
Portraits in Life and Death
A new edition of the cult classic photography book by the legendary Peter Hujar.
“I am moved by the purity of [Hujar’s] intentions…. These memento mori can exorcise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic.” —Susan Sontag
Portraits in Life and Death is the only book of photographs published by Peter Hujar during his lifetime. The twenty-nine portraits of creative people—ranging from William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and John Waters to Larry Ree, founder of the Trocadero Gloxinia Ballet Company, and T.C. (whose identity is unclear)—possess a haunting beauty and degree of psychological examination that is both offbeat and riveting. Following the portraits come eleven images that can only be described as devastating: pictures of semi-preserved, clothed bodies of nineteenth-century Sicilians found in the arid catacombs beneath a church in Palermo.
There is no necessary connection in the photographs themselves or between the two sections of the book, yet the pictorial progression from life to death is an emblem of the journey we all take. The living subjects seem to be meditating on the mortality that is limned with such profound effect in the catacomb pictures. In different ways, both groups of images speak to the basic fears and emotions that we carry with us, somewhere beyond our consciousness. After viewing this extraordinary book, it is almost impossible not to make those connections and interpretations or be moved by Hujar’s consistent ability to convey what appears to be the inner spirit of his subjects.
Even so, an air of nonchalance, even gaiety, hovers over the photographs. The book is odd, oblique, sometimes opaque, and certainly deeply felt; but it sticks to the mind like a burr. It will be noticed. Once seen, it cannot be forgotten.
Published by Liveright, W.W. Norton
Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom,
Intimate remembrances of Peter Hujar from his friend, posthumous printer and sometimes subject Gary Schneider
This suite of heartfelt accounts invites the reader firsthand into artist Gary Schneider’s journeys in image making with his friend and mentor, the beloved photographer Peter Hujar (1934–87). Drawing from a selection of Hujar’s pictures, Schneider (born 1954) takes each image as a point of departure to share his expertise as Hujar’s posthumous printer. Outside the darkroom, Schneider situates his chronicle squarely within the transformative social shifts of downtown New York City in the nascent years of the AIDS crisis. Through a mix of Schneider’s stories and technical prowess, he creates a rich tapestry that serves both as a historical testimony and a portrait of their relationship.
Schneider also writes in captivating detail describing his experience with Peter Hujar refining his abilities as a printer, as a subject of Hujar’s portraiture, as an extra hand accompanying the photographer on cruisy, nighttime shoots, and of when he turned the lens on Hujar to record him as a subject in his filmic work. Informative as it is stirring, Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom is an indelible portrait of a relationship delineated by photography, desire and gratitude.
Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom is published by Bookcrave Books