Peter Hujar — Portfolio — Slash Paris

Peter Hujar’s works tell, — without ever forcing the line, but whispering — the sensuality of the bodies, the brutality of the architecture and the perfume of the New York interlope of the seventies. Wonders that have never responded and will never respond to the economy of attention. What’s more, the artist never wanted to shout his talent on every rooftop. They even say he hung up on the merchants. The result was that he had very little exposure during his lifetime and, upon his death, was quickly forgotten. He remained “an artist,” as they say in the jargon.

Peter Hujar is the New York of the night after night, a New York in after time where, after partying, you find yourself with yourself and in silence. He thus photographs most of his models at home, outside of this hectic urban life, on a simple chair or in an elongated position. The artist excels when the bodies relax and he draws his most beautiful shots.

The artist shows a vulnerable New York defying the arrogant and fantasized image we like to attribute to it. His city is intimate, confidential and revealed in a soft and tender atmosphere. Its warmth and brilliance escape from beings and not from its neon or glitter. That’s why the photographer is a big fan of the bed and celebrates this flirtation between the skin and these bedroom fabrics in which we always leave a little of oneself. Let’s remember that shot, where the proud transgender icon Candy Darling poses like a movie star as she fights her cancer in a hospital bed.

Throughout his life, Peter Hujar photographed many drag performers (such as Ethyl Eichelberg or the Cockettes) and followers of camp aesthetics. Susan Sontag theorized it in her essay Notes Camp in 1964. She refers to it as « a love of the abnormal, of artifice and exaggeration [and] the most advanced extension, in sensitivity, of the metaphor of lived life as of theatre ». The photographer offers an extremely fine and all the more disturbing view. The theatricality conveyed by the clothes of his models melts under the weight of their vulnerability, so that the artifice seems to be no longer one.

The artist actually considered himself an « authentic », a « real » one. He says of the body he photographs: « I want people to be able to experience it tacitly and smell it, » in his nudes, pointing out imperfections: scars, dirt, traces of socks, wrinkles…