Neil Scott interview with John Douglas Millar for The Crop on Substack
‘ Without resorting to hyperbole, [Eyes Open in the Dark] was one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Hujar’s photographs have a sublime stillness, they evoke a devastating sense of presence. The quality and consistency of the prints allow the viewer to flow from one image to the next, without being interrupted by questions of form. His photographs show life made visible by the presence of death: sex and death, friendship and death, love and death, awareness and death. As his friend Susan Sontag wrote in her diary in 1976: “Death is the opposite of everything.” …
…Inspired by this ecstatic encounter, I got in touch with the co-curator, John Douglas Millar, who kindly agreed to speak to me about Hujar and the exhibition. ‘
“NS-You’ve co-curated this exhibition and are currently writing a biography of Hujar, I am curious about the extent to which the exhibition is a way of shining a light on his life in a particular way.
JDM- Absolutely. The top floor of the exhibition is all about 1976. The room that contains the contact sheets and the images from Easter Sunday, those two rooms and the David Wojnarowicz Sex Series piece. That is basically the first chapter of the book. You can follow Hujar around Manhattan on Easter Sunday 1976. He begins uptown shooting the faithful on the steps of Saint Patrick’s on 50th and 5th. Then moves down to the West Side piers where he shoots this very ebullient queer scene, and then at the end of the day he ascends the World Trade Center and takes a photo that scans across the East River, catches the edge of the Lower East Side and the cruising grounds around the decommissioned naval docks in Brooklyn. It’s a remarkable day. And in those contact sheets you can see Marsha P Johnston, Stephen Varble, Camille O’Grady and others. It’s very rich, inherently novelistic really.
Downstairs is much more of an associative hang that was done in situ. Gary Schneider [the other co-curator] and I worked for two years on which images were going to go into the show, so we really had a feel for these particular images before installing them.”
“NS-There is a timeless quality to this work. The only image in the exhibition that feels trapped in time is the political poster.
JDM-Yes, and that was done as a favour. I don’t think he would’ve counted that as part of his oeuvre necessarily.
NS-It feels like queer culture is increasingly being absorbed into the mainstream. You’ve got the Leigh Bowery show opening this weekend, Drag Race, Derek Jarman in Glasgow, and most contemporary art exhibitions I see … I’m curious how normies utilise this stuff. For instance, as someone who is interested in Walter Benjamin, do you think cruising is an extension of the flâneur’s way of exploring the world?
JDM-When I originally started thinking about a book on Hujar, I thought he would almost stand in as a Baudelaire figure, as Baudelaire had been for Walter Benjamin. When I was saying I wanted to do a materialist history of that period in New York—or sometimes I think of it as a Balzacian approach—that has to do with being worried about versions of historicization of that period. It’s a positive that certain histories are being discovered and presented and so on, but I think there are risks in how that happens.
There were questions about the David Wojnarowicz exhibition at the Whitney in 2018. ACT UP were protesting outside because they felt that it was historicizing work in which there was still an ongoing struggle, saying isn’t it great that America got over AIDS. I would hate to think that the exhibition at Raven Row did that. At the same time, how do you—to use Benjamin’s term—make the work detonate in the present? It’s a complex question.”
“Peter Hujar — Eyes Open in the Dark closed on 6 April 2025.
Nude Opera: A Life of Peter Hujar is due to be published by Fitzcarraldo in 2029.”