Above: Jackie Curtis, 1969, job 466. Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection. Gift of Stephen Koch; 2021.153:8.
Joel Smith is the Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and author of Hujar:Contact, a volume collecting Peter Hujar’s original contact sheets and job books on the occasion of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition. To celebrate the book’s publication, Joel highlights the images that encapsulate Hujar's life, career, and community.
Murray Belsky, 1954. Job 100, 1 of 2 sheets
In 1954, less than two years out of high school, Peter Hujar was working as an assistant at a Midtown studio he was allowed to use on weekends. In this time, Hujar made the first work for which he preserved negatives, contact sheets, and a job book entry. It is a portrait session numbered job 100. The sitter is Murray Belsky – by all evidence a boyfriend at the time. (In later contact sheets Hujar and Belsky are seen skiing, camping at Lake George, and visiting Murray’s relatives.) Why does the record start here and not ninety-nine jobs earlier? To speculate: this may have been Hujar’s first session using a twin-lens 120mm, or ‘2¼’, camera. A 2¼, crucially, is held not to one’s eye but at the waist, allowing the operator to remain in direct visual communication with his subject while glancing down at the ground glass. As tentative as this awkwardly semi-clothed sitting is, it might have given Hujar his first inkling of an artistic future in which photographic and human encounter were one.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013.108:8.1
Capuchin Catacombs, Palermo, with Paul Thek, 1963. Job 256, 4 of 11 fragmentary sheets
In 1962–63 Hujar studied filmmaking in Rome while his partner, artist Paul Thek, kept a studio in Sicily. Hujar joined Thek there shortly before they returned to New York, and they visited the catacombs maintained by monks of the Capuchin order in Palermo. Thek was fascinated by the site, which he described as a room ‘decorated with corpses’; soon he would be making sculpture exploring the decay of the flesh and the body’s status as an object. The photographs Hujar made in the catacombs — which took, by his own estimation ‘about twenty minutes’ — proved to be of outsize importance in his later work, forming the second half of his 1976 monograph, Portraits in Life and Death.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013. 108:8.5269–72
Jackie Curtis for New Times, ca. 1970. Job 474 B, 1 of 7 sheets
The bond Hujar formed with Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis reflected, in part, their mutual rejection of familiar gender conventions. The ever-changeable Curtis told the New York Times, ‘I’m not a boy, not a girl, not a faggot, not a drag queen, not a transsexual – just me, Jackie’. This contact sheet comes from the session for a 1970 magazine feature on New Yorkers who defined the historical moment. Possibly Hujar, but more likely Jackie, used a grease pencil to imagine the fruit of their day’s labour landing on the cover of Vogue.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013.108:8.1200
Candy Darling, Cabrini Health Care Center, 1973. Job 587, 2 of 6 sheets
Before checking into Cabrini Health Care Center to be tested for lymphoma in September 1973, Candy Darling asked Hujar to come make a portrait ‘for my fans’. As he photographed, Hujar later recalled, Candy was ‘playing every death scene from every movie’. In the resulting image, Hujar shaped the humdrum features of the room (fluorescent light, hospital bedding, one rose) into an icon reminiscent of golden-age Hollywood glamour portraits. Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, printed from the top-right frame marked with a dot, appeared in the New York Daily News shortly after her death in March 1974, and in three more publications soon thereafter. The wide public circulation of the image may have led Hujar to exclude it from Portraits in Life and Death.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013.108:8.5770 and 2013.108:8.5771
Self-portraits at 189 Second Avenue, 1974. Job 620, 3 sheets
Hujar’s move into a large, low-rent loft at 189 Second Avenue in 1973 coincided with his decision to give up the commercial jobs that had been sustaining him, to focus on portraits and other personal work. As if trumpeting his arrival at the space that would double as home and studio until the end of his life, Hujar salutes his partner, the camera. He enacted this one-step dance repeatedly on three rolls of film, fully clothed on one roll and shirtless on the others. His sardonic gesture recalls the funny, appalling story he liked to tell of his high school graduation ceremony, where he sat, parentless, in the audience, and applauded slowly when his name was called.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013.108:8.2110
Water, Hudson River, 1975. Job 698, 1 sheet
In 1975 the artist Ann Wilson recruited Hujar, among other friends, to submit work for a collective art installation at Fordham University’s Saint Thomas More Chapel. This sheet records the conception of the work Hujar turned in: a series of eight studies of water on the East and Hudson Rivers. In the meditative setting of the chapel, the water surfaces, shaped unpredictably by wind and tide and reflecting the sky above, would have proposed an analogue to the mind or the soul: a fluid thing, constant in its nature but subtly evolving in relation to events below and above it. The finished prints (not from these negatives) are hypnotically absorbing, as must also have been the experience of watching the water in real time.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013.108:8.2516 and 2013.108:8.2509
Ethyl Eichelberger as Nefertiti, 1979. Job 833
An experienced Shakespearean whom he considered ‘the greatest actor of our time, the performer Ethyl Eichelberger proved Hujar’s most prolific and long-lasting collaborator. His photographs of Ethyl in character appeared regularly around the East Village between 1978 and 1985 on flyers for venues such as s.n.a.f.u. and the Pyramid Club. The first rather madcap session, photographed in 35mm, publicised Klytemnestra. Hujar used 120mm for his later, more earnest efforts to immortalise Ethyl’s grand dames of history and legend. (They all tended to find convenient moments to pick up an accordion and sing.) These included Nefertiti, Medea, Jocasta, Lola Montez, and Queen Elizabeth I – the top-billed player at Hujar’s fiftieth birthday party at Area in 1984.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013. 108:8.3300 and 2013. 108:8.3302
David Wojnarowicz #2, 1981. Job 936, 1 of 8 sheets
The defining relationship of Hujar’s final years was with David Wojnarowicz. They met at the Bar on Second Avenue in January of 1981. Wojnarowicz was writing poetry and playing music, and Hujar encouraged him to focus on his gifts as a visual artist. In his job book, Hujar distinguishes between two early sessions, ‘David W #1’ and ‘David W #2’. On the latter date, as seen here, he used bounced light to emphasise the volume of Wojnarowicz’s features and hint at his inner life, a dimension of the sitter that was at least as important to the portraitist as any matter of outward appearance.
Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund; 2013.108:8.4095
