They developed a way to signal each other—I’m here—at crowded gatherings: two fingers up like rabbit ears behind the head.
Hujar would eventually come up with a list of the ways in which he and David were karmically connected, but it wasn’t something he wrote down. All his friends could remember him saying was that both he and David had redheaded mothers. That was the least of it, of course.
Peter Hujar was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934 to parents who soon abandoned him. His father, Joseph, reportedly a bootlegger, actually absconded before he was born. His mother left for Manhattan, where she worked as a waitress in a diner after turning the infant Hujar over to her parents, Ukrainian immigrants who lived on a New Jersey farm. Hujar did not learn to speak English till he entered kindergarten. And while he remembered his grandparents as loving, especially his grandmother, he went to live with an uncle after the grandparents died, in an environment that was “worse than Dickensian,” according to his friend Fran Lebowitz. “His uncle had a lot of children,” Lebowitz said. “They would all sit down to dinner and all the other children would get chicken. Peter would get a piece of bread. On Sundays, the uncle’s children would get ice cream, but not Peter.”
While he lived in New Jersey, his mother would show up every week or so with whatever money she was contributing for his care, loudly complaining about it. Unlike David, Hujar did not often speak of his childhood. The detail above about his mother comes from Stephen Koch, who first met Hujar in 1965 and eventually became executor of his estate. When Hujar made his will and insisted on leaving one third of the net proceeds of all photos to his mother, Koch was taken aback. He asked why. She had never made one gesture of support to Hujar. She never once visited while he was sick. She would not attend the funeral. Hujar answered, with a fury, “I’ll pay her back every penny.”
Hujar had moved to his mother’s place at 340 East Thirty-second Street in Manhattan by the time he was twelve or so. His mother had remarried, and his new stepfather had a drinking problem. Or she did. Or they both did. Hujar left home while he was still in high school on the night his mother threw a bottle of beer at his head.
“He walked out the door, and he never went back. He lived on somebody’s couch,” said Steve Turtell, who met Hujar in 1971. “Somebody put him up for the last few months of his high school career. He attended his own graduation and sat in the audience, and when they called his name and no one stood up to get the diploma, Hujar sat in the back slowly clapping, and he was the only person applauding. He loved telling that story to me.” Hujar told Lebowitz, however, that he moved out when he was fourteen and had his own apartment in the West Village. He pointed out the building to her numerous times.
Hujar had attended the School of Industrial Art (later called the High School of Art and Design), knowing he wanted to be a photographer. There he had the good fortune to encounter a teacher—the poet Daisy Aldan—who recognized his artistic potential. According to Koch, she is the one who urged Hujar to start doing apprenticeships in commercial photography studios. He became very technically skilled in the darkroom, a master printer.
Steve Turtell heard one story from Hujar about an attempt he made to connect with his mother after his career took off in the sixties. He wanted her to know that he was making it. He wasn’t a nobody. So he told her that he was now friends with Andy Warhol. And she said to him, “Oh, isn’t he that fag?” It’s unclear how much contact Hujar had with her after that. Still, she had the power that mothers have. David once told me, outraged, that she’d often told Hujar he was ugly. And Hujar believed it.
“He never thought that people found him attractive,” said another old friend, critic Vince Aletti. In reality, Hujar was so handsome, charismatic, seductive, and engaging that often, when Aletti introduced people to him for the first time—it didn’t matter whether they were men or women—they’d be on the phone to Aletti the next day, burbling, “That guy is so fabulous. I love him!” Hujar was unable to take that in. He never believed that people actually valued his work, either, even when they told him they did.
In 1956, Hujar took photographs at a Connecticut school for developmentally disabled children. These were the first photos to become part of his oeuvre. This was also the year he met artists Paul Thek and Joseph Raffael. When Raffael won a Fulbright in 1958, he took Hujar with him to Italy. In Florence, Hujar found a Catholic institution where he took more pictures of neurologically impaired children. He was not yet doing portraits. His pictures show the children at play, and if they are visibly “different”—some have Down syndrome, for example—they are not caught up in their difference. They are not grotesque. They are who they are, and Hujar identified with them. “His experience of himself as a hurt child from a damaged family was lifelong and very powerful,” Koch said. “The beauty of things broken and damaged was what he was interested in. The reverse of Robert Mapplethorpe, who was interested in things that were perfect.”
In 1963, Hujar was back in Italy with a Fulbright of his own, traveling with his lover Paul Thek, photographing the catacombs at Palermo—where the corpses are dressed up and posing. Eleven pictures of these mummies, along with twenty-nine portraits of living people, ended up in the one book Hujar published in his lifetime, the one David saw: Portraits in Life and Death. “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures,” Susan Sontag wrote in her introduction to this book, “but all eyes at rest contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera knows, inexorably.… Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.”
By the mid-sixties, he was connected and respected in the New York art world. Warhol filmed him for one of his “screen tests,” in which individuals sat in front of a stationery 16mm camera for the duration of a hundred-foot roll of film. Warhol’s other subjects included Edie Sedgwick, Marcel Duchamp, and Bob Dylan, but he shot hundreds of these “tests,” and they weren’t all of famous people. He did, however, select Hujar for a compilation taken from the screen tests called The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.
When Stephen Koch met him in 1965, in Susan Sontag’s living room, Hujar had just spent the day photographing Jayne Mansfield. Koch was fascinated by Hujar’s observations about this star—her relationship to the camera, her relationship to her own body, her relationship to the entourage she’d brought along. At this point, Hujar was working for Harold Krieger, a commercial photographer best known for big advertising campaigns and magazine covers. It was the one time in his life Hujar had a middle-class income.
Soon after this came the shoots for Harper’s Bazaar and GQ, the master class with Richard Avedon, and what seemed the beginning of a successful career. But, as more than one friend told me, Hujar was his own worst enemy. One of his last fashion assignments—maybe the last—was a swimsuit spread. He was sent to Florida, and instead of hiring models, he went to the beach and found some teenagers to just hold the suits up. They didn’t even put them on. The magazine’s publisher was appalled.
Hujar didn’t reject fashion, and he wasn’t opposed to doing commercial work. He simply had his own ideas about what to do and how to do it. Nor did he wish to be poor. In fact, he resented being poor. He just wasn’t willing—and maybe he wasn’t able—to do the things that would allow him not to be poor.
“I watched Peter wring out a pair of blue jeans he had just washed in his own sink and hang them over the curtain rod to dry,” Steve Turtell recalled. “He washed his laundry in the kitchen sink because he couldn’t afford the Laundromat, or wasn’t going to spend his money on that. He was willing to live on just about nothing—in order to do nothing but his work.”
Koch called him “the poorest grown-up I have been personally close to in my life.”
Early in the seventies, Hujar moved to a loft at 189 Second Avenue, formerly occupied by his friend Jackie Curtis, the legendary drag queen and Warhol “superstar.” Here, where he would live for the rest of his life—where David would then live for the rest of his—Hujar began photographing friends like Charles Ludlam, Ray Johnson, and Ann Wilson for Portraits in Life and Death. “It was like a monk’s cell,” said Turtell. “He had what he needed and nothing more.” Bed. Table. Desk. A few chairs.
Even so, Turtell said it took him years to figure out how Hujar was financing this minimal lifestyle. “He took cash advances from the credit cards he had managed to get when he was a fashion photographer,” Turtell said. “He had high credit limits on these cards, and he would eke out a small amount, pay back the minimum, and take the cash advance only when he needed it and depend upon the kindness of his friends and the occasional grant and an occasional sale and an occasional job that he would be willing to do.”
Hujar was always analyzing his own relationship to money. “He believed that there was a flaw in him that made him wish to be poor,” said Koch. “He had this conviction that people get exactly what they want. So when he said, ‘I have to figure out how to make money,’ that wasn’t about ‘what phone calls I have to make.’ It was about ‘How can I settle it with myself? I have to figure out how to forgive myself.’ But he never did.”
Hujar was also convinced that certain names lent themselves to fame. Alliterative names, for example, like Marilyn Monroe or Jasper Johns. Friends would scoff, “And Andy Warhol?” No matter. For him, the point was that “Peter Hujar” was a terrible name. So he rearranged the letters to create the anagram “Jute Harper.” This was the name, he decided, that would make him rich and successful, and at some point in the eighties, he created a small body of work under that name, with David’s help. It was softcore porn done for greeting cards that could be sold in Christopher Street shops—for example, David and an unknown man dressed in sailor suits with their hands at each other’s flies. Hujar never made money from this venture either.
He lived so creatively on nothing. He was proud of how creatively. Who needs two sets of sheets? Take them off the bed, wash them, and put them back on. Who needs cleaning fluid for windows? Take a newspaper page and wet it. “He knew every trick that poor people know,” Lebowitz said. “Like, when you send a bill in, don’t put a stamp on it. They’ll either pay the postage due or send it back and then you have more time.” He ate lots of brown rice and vegetables. He ate lots of tuna casserole. Many friends remembered him coming regularly to their place for meals. Aletti, who moved in across the street in 1976, was then writing for Rolling Stone and went to rock ’n’ roll press parties several times a week. Often he took Hujar along, and they’d fill up on hors d’oeuvres.
Hujar knew everyone and attended many parties, but he’d complain, “I don’t have a Sam Wagstaff”—referring to Robert Mapplethorpe’s very rich and well-connected boyfriend. And if Hujar didn’t have that, Koch observed, “he’d have to court people, or at least not be difficult with them. Not throw them down the stairs. Not go into rages.”
Many of those close to Hujar had witnessed these rages. Koch was at the loft one night when an uninvited guest stopped by and would not leave when Hujar asked him to—so Hujar actually did throw him down the stairs. Aletti remembered a conversation with Hujar at the loft during which they disagreed—Alettti couldn’t remember on what but thought it unimportant—when suddenly Hujar picked up the chair he’d been sitting on. Aletti said, “He broke it into splinters in front of me. Just smashed it on the floor and kept smashing it and smashing it until there was just nothing more to break, and I was sitting there just frozen.” Turtell saw Hujar smash a bar stool against a wall one night at SNAFU, after Hujar had bumped his head on a pipe in the club’s basement. “Twice, to my knowledge, Peter broke bar stools,” Lebowitz said. She recalled an incident when two gallery owners from Paris took him out to discuss showing his work, and it ended with Hujar swinging a bar stool at them. “Trying to break it on people who are trying to further your career—that’s Peter,” she said.
Of course, he wasn’t physically violent as a rule—just impolitic. One night at a party, he was introduced to Cecil Beaton, highly regarded for his photos of everyone from Marilyn Monroe to the queen of England. Beaton said, “I understand that you are a very fine photographer.” Hujar replied, “I hear the same about you,” and walked away. He took his camera along to another party, where he photographed a few people. The artist Peter Max was there and kept asking to be photographed. Max was of no interest to Hujar, who ignored him until Max finally said, I’ll give you one of my pictures. This probably occurred in the early seventies when Max’s psychedelic graphics were ubiquitous, even appearing on the New York City phone book. Hujar told Max he did not need one of his pictures since he had a phone book.
Hujar’s ideas about art, in particular, were not flexible. He would announce, for example, that Rudolf Nureyev was not a dancer in his soul, but Eleanor Powell—she was a dancer in her soul. This he considered inarguable. “He was always on the lookout for someone that he thought of as a genuine artist,” Turtell said. Only a small group qualified, in Hujar’s opinion. For example, he greatly admired Ethyl Eichelberger—who had once been James Roy Eichelberger, who had once been the lead character actor at Trinity Repertory Company, who had once been on track for a successful conventional acting career, but gave it all up to join the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and later to play “the great women of history” in assorted downtown dives. Ethyl had decided: This is my path, and there’s no questioning it. That’s what got Hujar’s attention.
During the time he was preparing Portraits in Life and Death, he usually went to Turtell’s place for Sunday brunch. “He would make lists of who was going into the book on my breakfast table,” said Turtell, who was very close to Hujar in the seventies. They were never lovers, but “the kind of friends who could listen to each other breathe on the phone.” For this project, Hujar wanted people with “a certain kind of isolation built into their personalities,” Turtell said, people whose art came out of that profound isolation. As Hujar’s did. “Peter had a kind of fundamental isolation that he could never escape. And he knew it. It was the source of his suffering. It was also the source of his art and his insight.” Portraits in Life and Death is now a collector’s item, but it found its way to the remainder bins during Hujar’s lifetime.
He had disdain for the whole process of selling himself. Fran Lebowitz pointed out that he also had a profound distrust of authority and that “he couldn’t make a distinction between someone who owned some little photography gallery and the Pope.” In the seventies, Hujar had two solo shows at Marcuse Pfeifer’s gallery, at the time one of the few galleries devoted to photography. She also put him in a group show. This was the most attention he ever received from a gallery during his lifetime, and he chose to leave it. “It was not easy to sell his work,” Pfeifer said, though he had a few savvy collectors including Avedon. He seemed bent on self-sabotage. Pfeifer once accompanied him to the Port Washington Library, where he was supposed to talk about his work (probably the only time in his career he was invited to do so), and he hadn’t prepared anything. He got up and had no idea what to say. He left Pfeifer to show at the Robert Samuels Gallery but had some sort of blowup there. Aletti heard a story about Hujar breaking a frame and walking out in a huff. He did not have another show in New York until David persuaded his own dealer, Gracie Mansion, to take him on in 1986 for what proved to be the last exhibit he would have before he died.
But then, Hujar always sensed that he’d be better known after he was dead. He was also enough of a snob to claim that he didn’t want his name bandied about by people who didn’t really know what he’d achieved. He liked to tell stories about “the real one.” As in, “Forget Marlene Dietrich. Greta Keller taught Dietrich everything she knew. You have to listen to Greta Keller.” He saw himself as a “real one,” and he was willing to sacrifice everything to be that.
“In the long run, Peter got exactly what he wanted,” Turtell said. “He once said to me, ‘I want to be discussed in hushed tones. When people talk about me, I want them to be whispering, “Peter Hujar.” ’ ”
Hujar once invited the London-based drag troupe Bloolips to pose. This was in 1980, while they were in New York performing Lust in Space. They went dolled up but only in street makeup. (They often wore whiteface and glitter onstage.) The Bloolips spent hours at the loft but Hujar decided it just wasn’t working. “We couldn’t ‘reveal,’ “ said ex-Bloolip Bette Bourne. “As an actor, you have to reveal. And Hujar’s big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn’t know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are. And then he could go inside. That’s what the actor tries to do as well. You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone. That’s what Peter wanted and that was his great, great talent and skill.”
Hujar loved drag and photographed many a queen, usually with great success. He was able to show that drag isn’t just a man in a dress, that drag isn’t about artifice—it’s about identity, and the clothing is part of it. That’s clear in one of Hujar’s masterpieces, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed. Photographed just a few days before she died in 1974, Candy is lying there in full regalia with the long-stemmed rose Hujar had brought her, and she’s so glamorous, so “flat, real who-you-are,” that it isn’t apparent at first glance that she’s in a hospital bed.
A Hujar masterpiece: Candy Darling on her Death Bed, 1973. Vintage gelatin-silver print, 14 × 14 inches. (© 1987 Peter Hujar Archive, LLC. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York)
Hujar had developed his ideas about portraiture by looking at classical paintings, in which the sitter simply looks at the painter. Many of his photos were composed that way, though sometimes the person was doing some physical activity or pose. Gary Schneider, who posed for Hujar naked with his legs over his shoulders, analyzed the technique as Hujar “waiting for the person to come to him and him just being very present.” Hujar was looking for genuine connection. “Everybody thought they were his best friend,” Schneider said, “so all of a sudden you were inside his camera with him. For me that was a major moment. Very sexual, very sensual, and very intimate. And I think that’s why he got those portraits that feel like he’s in some kind of really private space.”
Schneider was a photographer himself, and—through Hujar—got a job at a major photo lab serving the fashion industry. Schneider regarded Hujar as his teacher, because this man who could become so tongue-tied when discussing his own work could actually articulate things that were much more esoteric. “He taught me how to locate the meaning of the image and how to manipulate the print, in the darkroom, to tell that story,” said Schneider. “He could explain how the bright and dark areas of the print guide the eye.”
Schneider turned out to be very gifted. From ’79 on, he processed all of Hujar’s film, though Hujar never paid him. (He gave him photos in exchange.) When Hujar was shooting on the street, Schneider would go with him and be the eyes in the back of his head. Then when Hujar went to the darkroom, he’d make a print and correct, correct, correct, until he’d overcorrect and emerge with seven prints, and Schneider would help him choose the right one. “That’s how I learned to see,” Schneider said.
In 1981, Hujar convinced Schneider and his partner, John Erdman, to open their own lab—with Schneider in the darkroom and Erdman doing everything else. Schneider and Erdman were among the few friends of Hujar’s who also became friends of David’s, and eventually Schneider began printing David’s work. But threads of the lab story are relevant to the larger story of Hujar’s influence. Or, as Erdman said, “Hujar would decide what you should do—and it’s amazing how far you would go to live out what he thought you should do.”
Schneider and Erdman had just set up shop in their St. Mark’s Place apartment, a ten-by-ten room, when they were approached to print Lisette Model’s work. She was a master of street photography with work in major collections all over the world. Hujar was the one who got excited, while Schneider worried that he wasn’t equipped to do it. “Peter always had a grand plan,” Schneider said. “He wanted me to learn how to print her prints because she was this grand master. He pushed me to do it.” As it turned out, Model loved Schneider’s work, and he printed her photos for the rest of her life.
The lab grew fast, and they soon moved to a larger space on Cooper Square, which Hujar helped them set up. But Erdman had begun to sour on the friendship—and he’d known Hujar since 1969. “He made us open this lab. He was like a Svengali with Gary, and I just knew it wasn’t right for us. We weren’t businessmen. We came out of the art world,” said Erdman, who had been a performer with Richard Foreman, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Wilson. “We started to lose money right away.” This despite the fact that they were soon printing for Avedon, Irving Penn, Francesco Scavullo, the André Kertész estate, a few of the Magnum photographers, and Steven Meisel (specifically, Madonna’s Sex book). Theirs became the lab for black and white, with an international reputation. Schneider too was a master printer, the only other person Hujar would have trusted with his own work. But Erdman said, “The more successful we became, the more money we lost. It got more and more out of control.”
No doubt this is because Schneider approached the work as an artist, not as a technician. “I really believed that no one needed to know how long it took me to make a print,” he said, “as long as the print I presented to them was infallible. I never brought an artist in and said, ‘Is this good enough?’ I never had a print rejected.” But they were working seven days a week for long hours—and Schneider went through lots of expensive photo paper to get to those infallible prints.
At one point, they offered to make Hujar a full partner and brought him in to help, since he was desperate for money and they were desperate to make the lab work. Hujar printed for two days. Then Schneider, at work in the next darkroom, heard a loud scream and a crash. Hujar had thrown himself at the door and broken it, then run from the lab. Two days later, he came in to apologize, saying he’d snapped when forced to expend such care making prints for a photographer (well known but no one named above) whose work he thought inferior to his own. Now he understood—the lab enterprise was impossible.
“Too late!” said Erdman.
“But,” said Schneider, “I actually love printing. It’s the perfect counterpoint to doing my own work. So in the end, I’m grateful to him. Because the lab was really his construct.”
One day, Schneider and Erdman ran into Jim Fouratt on the street.
Erdman had first met Fouratt right after Stonewall, during a march down Christopher Street. Back before he was a nightclub impresario, Fouratt had been a founder of the Gay Liberation Front. Erdman hadn’t seen him in about ten years, not since Fouratt had broken up with his then-boyfriend Peter Hujar.
He invited Schneider and Erdman to come with him that night to see someone read, a guy he was working with at Danceteria. A busboy with the unpronounceable name of Wojnarowicz.
“Three people were reading,” Erdman recalled. “The other two were well known. David was the B-side. And it was like the first time I saw Patti Smith. The performance was genius. The words were genius. I really thought I knew good performance, and this was A-plus.”
Hujar took this Self Portrait (with a string around his neck) in 1980, not long before he met David. After Hujar’s death, David placed this photograph next to his front door so it would be the last thing he saw when leaving home. Pigmented ink print, 20 × 16 inches. (© 1987 Peter Hujar Archive, LLC. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York)
David and Hujar had not yet met each other. This reading probably occurred in 1980, but decades later Erdman still remembered that David read a story from his hustling days about going home with a parolee, only to have the police show up so David had to jump out a window. It became one of his monologues: “Boy in Horn & Hardart’s on Forty-second Street, New York City.”
“I was an instant fan,” Erdman said. “Totally hooked. I thought, this guy is unbelievable.”
Hujar felt an immediate kinship with anyone who’d come out of an abusive childhood. So he and David had that connection, but not only that. “David’s story and his range of emotions and intelligence were fascinating to Peter,” said Vince Aletti. “He was not somebody that Peter could just move past. I sensed from Peter that he had found somebody, that if the lover part didn’t work out, that was OK, because there was something much more important there. And it was rare to get that sense from Peter.”
David had not made a good first impression on Aletti, however. “There was always a certain feeling of jealousy of the new boyfriend. Like, why couldn’t it be me? Which I think a lot of Peter’s friends secretly felt,” Aletti said. “But I remember thinking that David was not very good-looking, that he was kind of gawky and not particularly interesting—or verbal. I’m sure I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to meet him at that point. But—it’s funny. As soon as I saw Peter’s photos of him, I realized what Peter saw in him. Then I could see how sexy he was. It was like seeing him through Peter’s eyes in those pictures, and suddenly I thought, oh my god, this guy is amazing. And I basically just got over myself because Peter was so taken with him, and clearly there was something very solid there.”
Stephen Koch said that Hujar had a strong talent detector. “He knew that David was the real thing—and in Peter’s opinion, a big talent that needed development and guidance.” That, along with the fact that David was a hurt child. “Those two things were just an irresistible combination,” Koch said. “There was going to be art coming out of this. Peter’s gathering sense of being somewhat dead-ended would be relieved by David carrying on.” Koch thought that Hujar was in love with David and would have liked the sexual relationship to continue, but “he adjusted, moving into the paternal role, and when he found the paternal role, it actually was very fulfilling for them both.” Indeed, David seemed to reinspire Hujar, who became very productive in the eighties before he fell ill.
One night Hujar took Schneider with him to see 3 Teens Kill 4. “I have no recollection of the music at all, but there David was and Peter was fixated,” Schneider remembered.
“Almost from the beginning,” said Erdman, “you could see David’s lovingness to Peter, and you could see that he was infatuated with Peter as a person, but you could feel the un-sexual nature of it on his side. As for Peter, it never wavered. He was constantly interested. And it never got ugly. That was clearly not what was meant to be. He just adored David. Just adored him.”
One night, Schneider and Erdman went to Hujar’s place for dinner. And he showed them some doodle David had done. Schneider remembered it as a drawing on the door. Erdman remembered a piece of paper. Neither of them could remember what David had actually drawn.
“Peter thought it was just utter genius,” Schneider said.
Erdman said that whatever it was, he didn’t remember liking it. “But Peter said to us, ‘David left it, and I have told him he has to become a visual artist.’ ”