An Honesty Thing: Peter Hujar, “Eyes Open in the Dark” at Raven Row, London

Like a vow, a shine, a chance, or a breath, a photograph is something taken. This taking suggests a transgression that effects some form of transformation, that destines an infidelity. Yet in Peter Hujar’s vitalized portraits—coarsened and creamed, dusted and darkened—there is far less taking than giving. This giving arose from Hujar’s patience, noticing the shared introspection of each subject’s bringing into being of themselves. Difficulties are detours, discoveries, in a person’s attentiveness to oneself, and therein one finds. One finds that to be oneself takes a lifetime. In between, an exhale, a photograph, rendering and releasing the portrait as a slipped, unbuttoned pact. Arresting because unloosing, Hujar said: “It’s an honesty thing.”¹
These honesties are now well historicized. Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London, sympathetically curated by the artist’s biographer John Douglas Millar and Hujar’s close friend and printer Gary Schneider, attests to these intricate dignities and their irrepressible gravity. Surveying works primarily from the 1970s and 1980s, the show largely represents Hujar’s final decade. What emerges is an attentiveness to subjects being impossibly themselves, and the intimacy forged to bring about such presence—something of a Hujar thematic so particularized and individuated, it nearly evades definition. Every “I” defies. As Roland Barthes asked, “I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what?”². Squarely, Hujar might have answered: you.

Again, Barthes unravels: “So many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures.”³ So many beginnings arrive and arrive in Hujar’s little universe, in which he remains the center among strobic suddenness. Or so the photographs greet us in the opening rooms: as linear apposition of syntactical sequence; as modernist grid; as closely hung vertical pairs.⁴ Encountered one by one at a measured pace, their episodic placement enacts the fragment as its own honest shard, set apart, yet never without its attachments. Holding that the “negative has an edge,” Hujar’s intermittent preservation of the black frame contributes to this rhythmed geometry of iconologies: humans, animals, ruins, architectures. In fact, the formalist austerity of his work seems an attempt to mitigate the fragmentary form of the self—or to admit that fragments are forms of life: necessarily scattered, doubtful and provisional. Isolate, indefinite, intervallic, Hujar’s dialectic of liquidity and assembly finds wholeness in a fragmented and fluid serenity of arrest.
 
The metallized mounds of Steel Ruins #7 (1978) are grassy infinities of curls, a retinal hoard of death confetti in which Hujar finds a wafer of light. Centered within a three-by-seven grid, the stray light-form becomes an unlikely infinity point. Trace the fat, surgent vein as it sinuates the calf of Paul Hudson (Leg) (1979), throbbing out into the undulant fundament of a foot. A recumbent Discarded Rug (1976) is glamoured by dappled sunlight, its heavy folds a mellow abstraction of smoothened suspense. Dead Cat, Pennsylvania (1969) is a cosmology of decay, its carcass declining into a graveled firmament. Conspiracies of interior and exterior magnetics breed a visual haptics of minor magnitude. Exposing interiorities from interiorities, the catis an artifact of affect, an essay in extensity. Perhaps Hujar’s most durable fragment is the one implied by the briny corpse of Dead Gull (1985). Wedged upright in the sand, its wings recall Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor study Wing of a European Roller (1512)—a disembodied charm that migrated throughout Hujar’s life, to finally rest as an engraving in the black granite of his gravestone.
 
After his AIDS diagnosis in January 1987, Hujar never returned to his darkroom. When he died in November of that year from pneumonia related to the disease, aged fifty-three, his favored gelatin silver paper also ceased production, dying with him.⁵ Ever since, Schneider’s posthumous prints have transpired careful invocations and descriptions, extending the sensory experience in every photograph as a newly touched becoming, acts of love incarnate. Hujar’s fluent proficiency in the darkroom created spectrums of black-and-white tonalities so expansive they conjure a nocturne holography. Tenuities of light suffuse skins in a neorealist cinematics of temperate, auroral glows, while nuanced blacks transmute chiaroscuro into an embodied balm: oily, velvety, feathery. This, coupled with his preferred Rolleiflex—which requires looking away from the subject—deepened his slowed photography of a touching and touchable world. It vivifies detail in the rubbered gristle of a dildo; in the viscid gloss of a heel; in the pert nugget of a nipple; in the chalky diacritics of scars; in the shivered glissando of piss. It locates and loses us in the molting interstice of Hallway, Canal Street Pier (1983), where a thin stream of sunlight fractures the already-simmering disintegration, its pathway of shattered glass, sloughed plaster, and amassed dust softened by cruising’s tread. The bulky debris of Canal Street Pier, New York (Stairs) (1983) leads the eye up a gaping stairway to nowhere. Potential has met its limit—or, more optimistically, is preserved in darkness beyond reach. Surfacing its textures of tenderness, aliveness, and aloneness on the level of gelatin silver ashes, this materiality burgeons registration as well as a sense of doubt or relativity as to what is being seen. Can a cow be that uncanny?
 
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“A curtain blows in the wind and this could mark the inside or the outside, but neither is fixed, they are together in a situation where they produce each other. The line is drawn and the line changes.”⁶
 
Beholder and beheld are together in a situation, a breeze or a sigh compelling their mutual production. Marked by radical capacities of sheer attention, Hujar’s portraits materialize an ethics that does not coax vulnerability but instead surfaces the formation of trust. Stripped of puncta, the faces of humans and animals emerge with unfaltering sobriety. They simply are, and with an is-nessso real it breaks into the opaque. Here are intimate studies of Victorian sensibility à la Julia Margaret Cameron, suffusing a consciousness of life where all manners of social contact and reflexivity are poised as if a natural phenomenon. A collapsed shack in a New Jersey night, its white paint flaking, tapers into a lounging William S. Burroughs, an exquisite mirroring. A frilled amulet is Jackie Curtis’s breast-pocketed chrysanthemum (Jackie Curtis, Funeral [1985]), rebounding in rippled oases of petaled and quilted whites. Rebounding, too, in the scalloped down of White Turkey, Pennsylvania (1985), where every feather is a fan, its parted beak and awestruck eye a witness, perhaps, to some small miracle. One thinks of Gary Indiana Veiled (1981), his face diaphanously wrapped in astral asphyxiation, a sidereal starlet. Eyeing the heavens, there is Greer Lankton (1983), a supine and stretching quicksilver creature. It’s not just the wetted chip in Ethyl Eichelberger’s iris, lit like socketed quartz, but the haloed slope of his eyelashes. Chin in hand, the light catches on each strand of hair and carves muscular shadows. His face a deliquescent architecture of satin, water, skin: a wave of shine. Similarly, in Clarissa Dalrymple’s Dog, Kirsten (1984), attention is motioned in a swerve: from the murky blur of the dog’s coat, focus winnows to the almost dolorous orb of her right eye. We are, quite literally, moved to the very density of detail where attention is held. Every look, once offered, is a citation of staged consent where relationality happens in the space of encounter, Hujar’s giving of photographs enacting a moral gesture wherein attentiveness becomes an ethics. As Harrison Adams writes, Hujar “gives consent pictorial form,” that is, “to make the viewer party to and part of that experience through the effect of attentiveness.”⁷ It’s a form that arrives through a Bergsonian freedom as duration, freedom as timelessness, freedom as suspense, whereby two people, in a situation, see each other.
 
Description produces pleasure that is “granular, slow, compressed, attentive, appreciative”—a physicalized language that surely describes Hujar’s photographs.⁸ Description can go near and far, stun and stretch, defamiliarizing and expanding sensory experience. Sight lines interpenetrate across the connected eighteenth-century rooms upstairs, pulling intimate focus to the relationships between Hujar, Paul Thek, and David Wojnarowicz. Vectors of psychic energy are the subliminal force in a 1973 portrait of a tempestuous Thek. Exposed to the elements, he exceeds the frame that places him off-center, his face straining and hand hovering within a moment of galvanic expression. Then, leaning against the mirror above a mantlepiece is a nymphean Thek from 1957, reposed on a bed of pine needles; in rearview reflection we glimpse Hujar’s nude self-portraits. Then again, there is Wojnarowicz’s triptych of Hujar’s death: “Portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again—I kept trying to get the light I saw in that eye.”⁹
 
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“Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world.”¹⁰
 
“Jerking off / I cancelled reality / a) Describe / b) Disappear”¹¹
 
Hope is an absented cumshot . . . or so I think of Bruce de Sainte Croix’s(1976) self-love, his torso tightened in a rigor of pleasure over his dick. Before that, volume drops and edges melt: you follow his foot and traverse his leg. Some time later you reach a thinly leaked light, coiled around his glans, reflected upward to a face moistened in pools and bands, his dimpled chin, his cupid’s bow, the ridge of his nose. Interiority within interiority: “I am sitting inside of a kind of moment of revelation,” Croix reflected. It is a “quiet ecstasy where one simply sighs in understanding.”¹² Capsuled ecstasy, like marble, has its durability. As an introspective communion on decelerated display, masturbation performs a carnal animism. As with Daniel Schock’s (1981) contortive urge to suck his big toe, these are not autoeroticisms but autopoieses, indifferent and aware, showing with spartan brilliance the blinding real, as Hujar once put it: “The sight of naked flesh for me is like a physical blow.”
 
The water bruises, absorbing the blows. New York’s Hudson and East Rivers in Hujar’s eight photographs, part of a concentrated display of work from 1976 on the upper floor, are horizon-less witnesses. Each is an immersion into endless differences. The rivers are gelatinous sheets of obsidian. Rested reflections are finely layered chiffons, faint geodes in their way. The rivers are petroleum dunes, salted by raindrops. A psychic meteorology, the rivers are transcendent portraits of a city and a person, in pieces.
 
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Being signs of life, the photographs on view carry presences of impermanence, limitation, fatality, and grief. To meet Hujar’s attention, there has been a purposeful withholding of biographical and contextual information in this text, for we know what will have been. We know that the work contends with awareness of the tragedies of unlived futures, that it redoubles the already patent empathy and pathos, that every caress carries its edge. To see these works as precursive contexts delimits their capacity and reach, condemning them to Susan Sontag’s misfire that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.”¹³ Rather, as Adrian Rifkin writes: “Hujar’s singularities differentiate states of existence in a way that makes a social or cultural history seem at best redundant, and at worst parasitic.”¹⁴ Scarcely speaking on his work, Hujar kept the powder of its poetics dry. Resisting the stifling museological impulses to chronologize or thematize these photographs, much less to sentimentalize their periodization, Eyes Open in the Dark enables a reading of his artistic language. We grasp his attentional ethics as a reciprocative energy, and his sighting of beauty as a survival method, before and beyond the photographs’ untimely evolution as memorials for an epidemic that still begins.¹⁵
 
“Solitude. Where does its value lie? For in solitude we are in the presence of mere matter. . . . If we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being.”¹⁶
 
Hujar meets Simone Weil’s ellipsis and fulfils her modal verb. “Attention is bound up with desire,” she writes, “not with the will but with desire—or more exactly, consent.”¹⁷ Forms of prayer, forms of love, Hujar’s paid attention was indeed “empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”¹⁸Eyes open in the dark, it is the gravity and grace of Hujar edging death yet holding: “America is such a beautiful country—don’t you think so?¹⁹

at Raven Row, London
until April 6, 2025

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) photographed his subjects with penetrating sensitivity and psychological depth. He captured intellectuals, luminaries, and members of New York’s subcultures in moments of disarmed vulnerability. Hujar embraced male sexuality unabashedly and was unafraid to examine death and dying. In her introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, Susan Sontag wrote, “Fleshed and moist-eyed friends and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, mostly lie—and are made to appear to meditate on their own mortality. . . . Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.” Hujar was at the forefront of the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. He succumbed to AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of work that has become posthumously celebrated. Hujar’s photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States, including at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the Grey Art Museum, New York University; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam for a retrospective in 1994. Exhibited and organized by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid starting in 2017, the exhibition Speed of Life made its final stop at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2019. In 2021, Hujar’s work was subject of a solo exhibition at the FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp, Belgium. In 2024, as part of the Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the Peter Hujar Foundation organized Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà. Hujar’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many other institutions.

Alex Bennett is a writer and critic based in London. He is a contributing editor for Flash Art.