Fillip

Two Hot Horses
Moyra Davey

Dalie Giroux

It was midsummer of 2019, and I was in the final stages of making a film called i confess, in which the political philosopher Dalie Giroux figures prominently, initially via YouTube videos found online and then in person in Montreal where we’d arranged to do a recording. Later, I had the opportunity to travel to the woods of La Pêche, Quebec, to meet with Giroux on her home turf. I’d had the idea of making her portrait. She’d agreed tentatively, though said she was not so comfortable in front of the camera, and so I said we’d play it by ear and perhaps I would just photograph her animals: the same chickens and dogs that appear gambolling through the frames of the film. As the travel date approached, I became more and more uneasy about the assignment. Still thinking I might attempt Giroux’s portrait, I kept asking myself, “What does it mean to go there and take her picture? How many times over how many decades have I done this with other subjects, and been disappointed?” Inevitably, when I think of new projects, I think of past missteps and draw certain doleful comparisons. Nonetheless, I showed up with the old Hasselblad and some black-and-white film and proceeded to photograph her chickens, her dog, and a magnificent white Percheron named Goya. The workhorse, who belonged to Giroux’s neighbour John Eaton, a painter, roamed the yard like a dog. There wasn’t a lot of light; it was early June and mostly raining and voracious mosquitoes swarmed us from all sides, so I had to focus the already difficult-to-focus 1960s-era camera while wearing a mosquito net over my face. And, of course, animals never stop moving. Later, I attempted a single shot of Giroux at dusk. There was a break in the weather and the setting sun briefly lit up her face. But I could see her flinch, as much from the weak beam of light in her eyes as from the lens too close to her face. The light lasted only a few seconds, and I missed my chance. I burned through a lot of film on that visit. I knew my limitations, and only through sheer luck would I come away with some interesting photographs—perhaps of the chickens.I resist making these sorts of pictures with a digital camera, even though it can capture everything. For a moving image, yes—I’ll use a Sony—but with still pictures, I continue to privilege analogue because of a materiality that, in my scheme of things, often becomes discursive. In a world that has become increasingly mediatized and virtual—colonized by technology, one human at a time—I want to make the kind of object that traces its roots back to the storytelling invoked by philosopher Walter Benjamin in his essay “Little History of Photography,” where he says that photographers are “descendants[s] of the augurs and haruspices”: those who spin tales and divine the future from animal entrails. It’s continuity with that narrativity that I want to hold on to, as well as the link with a materiality derived from solar rays and mineral compounds.
“Digital photography is implacable, violent. You have to trick it.”—Agnès Godard, cinematographer

Peter Hujar

In late July 2019, I was invited by Galerie Buchholz in Berlin to curate a show of Peter Hujar’s work in dialogue with my own. I first saw Hujar thirty years ago at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and in a show curated by photographer Nan Goldin called Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, held at Artists Space, also in New York, around the same time. Not long after that, I came upon Portraits in Life and Death, the only book of his work that Hujar saw published in his lifetime. Unlike certain, more worldly contemporaries, Hujar was not ingratiating; he refused to be a player and rebuffed curators and collectors. His friends held him in high esteem, but exhibitions of his photographs during his lifetime were few and far between. Now he is acclaimed and shown everywhere.I began the curatorial process by listing categories of Hujar images I wanted to see: animals, water, young men, body parts, New York City, babies—choosing images I knew my own could be in conversation with. I made my selection at the Peter Hujar Archive in Queens, trying as much as possible to choose pictures that had been little, if ever, exhibited (the ungreatest hits of Peter Hujar), because Hujar was prodigiously good, and the archive holds a wealth of material that has rarely, if ever, been seen, and it deserves to be seen. Stephen Koch, trustee of Hujar’s estate, was present, and he told stories and anecdotes about the artist and approved my selections, saying that, in terms of my stated goal to choose from the unreleased material, I was “batting a thousand.”Needless to say, I felt cautious making and curating my own work alongside Hujar’s. Such a project is a gambit, but as soon as the invitation was extended, I knew I couldn’t resist it. Nan Goldin was asked to do something similar by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. She was sent a self-portrait of Hujar in his underwear and was asked to respond with a series of self-portraits of her own. Goldin’s rejoinder is a gloriously in-your-face, chutzpadik clobbering of the conventions of vanity portraiture. I’ve photographed my dogs over several decades, and Hujar was never far from my mind as I did this. At this point I’d begun to photograph horses, actively channelling him. It was now August and baking hot, and I’d limbo my body through electric wire fencing to reach the horses, covered in flies, some of them standing in twos, mane to tail, in a lovely pair-bond ritual of mutual fly-swishing. I’ve never more appreciated Hujar’s photographic genius than in my own flawed attempts to commune with equines, as he apparently did, coaxing the animals as he took their picture.

Animals

Everyone agrees that Hujar is unrivalled when it comes to photographing animals. His horses and cows and dogs peer into the lens as though hypnotized, sometimes in pairs, and these images have an immobility that is truly novel. Animals don’t hold still, except for Hujar. He connected with farm animals in rural Pennsylvania, and with chickens and a rooster in Key West, Florida, where he made images that are surprisingly reminiscent of the famous Farm Security Administration photographs. At their best, Hujar’s photographs of geese, cows, and workhorses in cold, muddy fields hold their own with any of the incandescent portraits executed in his studio in New York’s East Village.I use many cameras, both digital and analogue, but there is this constant drive to see if I can perform the magic of the film camera and come away with a blessed transformation. This term, “transformation,” I learned from the filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery. It means waiting for the film to come back from the lab in hopes that the footage has transcended banality and predictability.Shortly after completing a photographic blitz of horses and ponies and donkeys in Upstate New York, I went on vacation to Provincetown, Massachusetts. I was exhausted, I’d pushed myself, I was not even going to bring my camera; but at the last minute, I grabbed the backpack with my Hasselblad and light meter. On my second day there, I ran into Paul Tasha, a local rider, crossing Commercial Street astride a dark bay and leading another very old and lame horse. I followed them to the beach, where they waded into the ocean, chest deep, many people taking photos with their phones. I waited and watched; I could not decide what to do. Eventually I pushed my bike back through the sand and rushed to the house for my camera, but by the time I made it back to the beach, they were out of the water and I’d missed my chance.

Loss

I agonized over that lost image. I knew I’d write about it as in the model posed by photographer Hervé Guibert in his essays from the book Ghost Image. That approach—a lost photograph translating itself into writing—has become a device for me. I even wondered if my reticence at the beach was enabled by the fact that I knew I had a likely chance of converting the missed opportunity into words. I wondered, right then and there, if I’d find a different approach, a new twist on writing the story of loss redeemed through writing. I’d hedged. I didn’t have the hunter’s instinct to immediately run for the camera, to be the kind of person who always carries a camera, loaded, to be adept, to not be fumbling and making excuses, to have appetite and drive. Why was I this person: too shy to seize an opportunity, timid and diffident, reluctant to ask permission? I wanted the pictures—I just didn’t know if I could summon the resolve to plead, to make contact, to risk refusal. To encapsulate the photographic ethos I’ve been trying to conjure—the one I find so difficult to summon for my goals—here’s Chris Marker from his 1966 film Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (If I Had Four Dromedaries):Photography is the hunt. It’s the instinct of the hunt without the desire to kill. It’s the pursuit of angels...we stalk, we take aim, we pull the trigger and bang. Instead of a corpse we make something eternal.In her introduction to Peter Hujar’s 1976 book Portraits in Life and Death, philosopher Susan Sontag inverts this sentiment a little, referring to photographers as “recording angels of death.” Elsewhere in my work, I’ve riffed on my ambivalence over things like the life lived versus the life narrated or recorded. For instance, in my film Hemlock Forest (2016), I write, apropos the exhaustion factor: Desperate has evolved. Now there is the vanity of self-preservation, in the sense that if I push myself too hard I become depleted, gaunt. “What’s the use of working oneself to death...” But like most in my situation I need to keep working to live, and not just materially, because “I’ve come to realize [I’ll never] find happiness in idle pleasure...”The two slightly dramatic phrases embedded in the above paragraph are lifted from plays by Henrik Ibsen.

Liz

While still in Provincetown, I wrote to the artist Liz Magor:There is a slightly feral man here who keeps two horses and takes them into the ocean when it gets really hot. I would like to photograph them, and I brought my big camera, but at the same time I am worn out from taking pictures, need a rest and don’t know if I can muster the obsessive pursuit and wooing needed to get him on my side and give permission.On my last day there, she wrote back:I understand about the wooing and convincing of people you need to win over in order to do a project. I sometimes do that.... Makes me feel like a liar. Or a lying seducer. But two hot horses, on a hot day, in the ocean!? Sounds pretty rare. Can’t you steal the image? Like with a long distance lens. Better a thief than a liar.Or a beggar, I thought, which is what I was reduced to in the end. I definitely would have stolen the image if I’d seen Paul Tasha out in the bay a second time, but as far as I know, the bathing of the horses at low tide did not happen again while I was there.

Gift

This ambivalence, this reticence, has dogged me for as long as I’ve been taking photographs. Certainly others feel it, even if only at an unconscious level, and it might contribute to the photographer’s belief in the happy accident: the idea of a photograph as a gift as opposed to a theft.

Paris Photo

I was invited to do a book signing at Paris Photo in November. I hesitated to accept, knowing the brevity of the trip and the inescapable jet lag. But then I decided it would be an opportunity to survey the international photography landscape displayed in the fair’s more than two hundred booths. I dislike art fairs and rarely attend them, but somehow I imagined a photo art fair would be different, less off-putting. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Even the best work struggled to hold its own in the cramped, makeshift displays under bright lights, hemmed in by the thousands of jostling bodies. Soon enough, everyone was starving, and since the security level was high and it was hard to leave and re-enter, attendees usually opted to stand in long lines for the expensive, cardboard-like food offered on site, eaten in haste and with the feeling of being trapped in the bubble of the large crystal Grand Palais.

Sarah Anne Johnson

I spotted a photograph by Sarah Anne Johnson at Stephen Bulger Gallery’s booth and remembered that when I’d been to Ottawa for a site visit to the National Gallery of Canada a few years back, I’d seen a suite of her works documenting raves. Her project was to revisit and capture some of the spaces and experiences of her youth, notably the all-night outdoor parties where people gather together to listen to music and trip. A handful of the photographs are unmanipulated documents of artifacts from the events, such as a long handwritten list of hallucinogens, but most were enhanced in Photoshop. I’m drawn to these photographs because there seems to be a clear raison d’être behind the digital manipulations, and to my mind it works: the photographs actually convey the camaraderie, the long, trippy, white nights, the filtering in of dawn, and the slow reintegration of bodies into normative routines with heightened endorphins and altered consciousnesses. I cite Johnson because I think she is a good example of an artist who graphically intervenes into the photographic image and does so with a tangible objective and distinct rationale.

Santu Mofokeng

At Paris Photo, I quickly took refuge in the books section, where publishers were displaying treasures from their backlists alongside their latest photo book offerings. A standout was Steidl’s valise edition of Santu Mofokeng: Stories (2019), a collection of a dozen large photo booklets. Rather than produce a giant coffee-table monograph, Steidl opted for this user-friendly format, which allows viewers to get comfortably close to Mofokeng’s classic black-and-white imagery, to inhale the inky saturation of the offset printing, and to read the accompanying texts. By way of personal example, in all the opportunities I’ve had to make books, I’ve consistently eschewed the large-format, hardcover model. When I won the 2018 Scotiabank Photography Award, which normally involves making a large, hardbound book, I argued to create a smaller, softcover one, part reader and part photo book.

Sunil Gupta

Christopher Street (2018), a spiral-bound book by Sunil Gupta I wish I’d bought, candidly documents gay men, single and in groups, striding about New York’s West Village in 1976. Some men are casual, others are strutting and preening, and many of the images have a sexual charge. Gupta has also produced a series of photographs of gay couples posed in domestic settings, but in my view they fall into the category Roland Barthes named the “studium” and lack the frisson of the street portraits.

Simryn Gill

I also found a copy of Simryn Gill’s Wormholes (2016), a thick, pulpy book printed on cheap paper, accordion-style, with black-and-white photos and fragments of text by the author. The texture, pliability, and materiality of this book is in keeping with the compostability suggested by the title. Gill is an artist I’ve long admired, though I know very little about her. Her photographs made an impression on me years ago when I came across them in a magazine: architectural ruins and abandoned building projects, everything from authentically old houses, to faux Tudor-style structures, to unfinished cement-and-glass modernist housing developments in the process of being reclaimed by the jungles and forests of Malaysia (casualties of a financial crash). Her photos fall into the typologies genre, but they have nothing of the stark, methodical look that that term implies. They have a tropic sensuality that drew me in. I had no idea who she was, but I retained her name and a deep visceral impression of the work. Later I came across a text aptly comparing this series, titled Standing Still (2000–03), to two other classics of the genre: Homes for America (1966–67) by Dan Graham and The Monuments of Passaic (1967) by Robert Smithson: lodestar works for many of us.

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela is a years-long project (2003–12 and ongoing) by Gauri Gill in which she photographs girls in rural Rajasthan, first in black and white and then in colour. She organized and taught photography workshops for the girls, most of whom had limited education and opportunities, and in 2012 she captured the project in a bold and sumptuous book printed on transparent velum paper, so that the images ghost one another.

Algirdas Šeškus

I found two books of Algirdas Šeškus’s tiny black-and-white gelatin silver prints, photographs shot in the 1970s in Soviet-era Lithuania. Most of Šeškus’s images retain an unconventional, broken frame line, and his work is described in terms reminiscent of the language used by photographer Zoe Leonard and others to invoke the embodied maker behind the camera—a concept I will go into a little later on. Šeškus writes: “The photographer is characterized by an interest in the nature of the image, by a match of intent and meaning with the fact (when the event is the actual shooting) and by de-contextualization of content.”I had the pleasure of meeting Algirdas Šeškus at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, where we’d been assigned opposite walls on which to install our work. As I was gently tapping pushpins into drywall, Šeškus’s team was busy drilling into concrete. It was a deafening racket, and while he spoke little English, his curator did, and she was profoundly apologetic. But they had a vision: to install his tiny black-and-white gelatin silver prints sandwiched between large sheets of glass on the concrete pillars between the windows. This meant that they were mostly backlit, and that one had to get very close to see anything. The noise was tormenting, but their concept was genius and they were the kindest of people, so I simply did my best to block out the din.

Gary Schneider in Paris

While still in Paris, I went to see the Hujar show at the Jeu de Paume (organized by the Morgan Library & Museum, New York) and had the good fortune to arrive at the museum just as the artist Gary Schneider—friend, model, and printer for Peter Hujar—was about to begin a presentation. It was sublime, and it proved to be the highlight of my Paris trip. Schneider showed the six contact sheets that Hujar shot during their session together in 1982 and walked us through the sequence frame by frame, discussing his own feelings and insecurities (Was he posing like someone else? Was he trying to please Hujar?) as well as Hujar’s behaviour behind the camera (apparently, Hujar never directed his subjects). Eventually, by the fifth or sixth roll, Schneider began to do yoga poses, and these are the frames Hujar printed. It was exhilarating to witness this retelling of a moment from decades past, brought to life as though it were yesterday. Schneider followed the presentation with a screening of his 1981 black-and-white film Salters Cottages, featuring Hujar, and later signed copies of his new book of the same title, composed of stills from the film.Hujar, who was beyond diffident when it came to the art world, cautioned, as imparted by Schneider: “When you start looking at what you make as a product, then you’re in trouble.” Schneider, who claims Hujar as his lifelong mentor, echoed that sentiment and said that he has always encouraged his students to have a job alongside their art practice, so they aren’t dependent on the market.

Performance

Schneider and theatre artist and dancer John Erdman opened a photo lab at Hujar’s urging and painstakingly processed all of his film. They printed for many artists, but the lab was more of a vocation and a labour of love than a business, and they struggled to keep it afloat. In a recent conversation with Schneider, John Schabel, one of the lab’s clients, signalled the performative aspect of Schneider’s analogue photography, both behind the camera and in the darkroom, and linked it to his own practice. For Schabel—known for his eerie photographs of passengers captured through the portholes of commercial airplanes—his images were always meant to imply, in his words, the questions: “Where am I? What is this point of view?” There also needed to be a kind of “seeking out of eccentric activity, a clumsy camera...dodging airport security.” For Schneider, being in the darkroom interpreting difficult negatives such as Schabel’s constituted a dynamic performance in its own right.

The Frame Line

In the 1960s and early ’70s, Hujar sometimes kept the black frame line around his pictures, saying: “To print the film frame [implied] this is not a painting, this is photography. This negative has an edge...[It’s] an honesty thing.” Richard Avedon, who collected Hujar’s prints, thought of his own use of the black border as creating a proscenium. Diane Arbus, who likewise used a signature, ragged frame line, snubbed Hujar, in part because she thought his work was derivative, and this wounded him. In a text for the Paris Review, literary scholar Yevgenia Traps interprets Zoe Leonard’s use of the black frame as “signaling to the viewer that the image is a product of labor.” Leonard herself has suggested it’s about eliciting dialogue between an embodied maker and the observer-receiver. In my own case, for many decades I arbitrarily printed the frame, but now I try to ground images through writing, by embedding them in narrative.Schneider, Schabel, Leonard, and I all came of age artistically in the postmodern era; we are all self-consciously trying to signal what’s going on behind the camera: the emotional register, the labour register, the thinking register, the mechanical register, the risk factor—they are as important to us as the image itself. Hujar was the opposite. Without self-regard, he gifted everything to the subject and the image through patience, framing, razor-sharp focus, and crystalline lighting. He apparently gave no direction and spoke very little to the human subjects in his studio. He waited for them to give to him whatever it was they were going to give, and then he took it—and after the wizardry of the darkroom, gave it back. As did Chris Marker, who said that in manipulating an image his goal was to offer his subjects “their best moment...making them truer to their inner selves.”

Bridges

The ultimate darkroom performances must have been the ones that produced the eight tour de force montages that came to be known as Sex Series (for Marion Scemama) (1988–89), produced by David Wojnarowicz in Hujar’s darkroom after his death, using masking and multiple exposures of images and diary fragments. I picked Hujar’s View from the World Trade Center (bridges) (1976) from the archive for the exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin because of a particular (filmic) relation I have to Lower Manhattan. Slowly, it dawned on me that Wojnarowicz had also used that image—flipped, reversed, and slightly cropped—for one of the Sex Series panels. Wojnarowicz’s Sex Series is among my all-time favourite artworks. I have stood in front of these photographs in museums and teased out every word and image, and been completely absorbed and transported, without a hint of the fatigue that less successful image-text works or institutional didactics can provoke. To my mind, they are the most successful images in this genre ever produced.

Interpretation

For the rest of us photographers, I wonder if such a tactic is feasible—as on this point of the clarity, readability, and accessibility of the photograph there seems to be little agreement: photographs are notoriously open to interpretation. Leonard has been forcefully insistent over many decades about how she wants her photographs to be received, and for those of us who’ve had the chance to hear her speak, there’s no misunderstanding the intention behind her images. In my own case, there is profuse language in writing, and it often materializes in video works that give context to my photographs. Someone who watches Wedding Loop (2017) or Hemlock Forest will know of my doubts and ambivalences around photographing my son and his friends, and this will inform their viewing of the images. But for a viewer who’s not watched or read other of my works, it’s anyone’s guess as to how they might apprehend images of teenage boys shot in beautiful light on 4×5 film: a photo of a dreamy boy with a patch of light on his face might easily be seen as nothing more than a vanity portrait taken by his mother. My son kept his friends at a remove, until the improbable moment when we found ourselves together in a house in the woods and they allowed me to record them on video. The studio portraits that followed are an outgrowth of the passing intimacies of that encounter and are linked to research into and contemplation of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of children. Susan Sontag, in many ways the final arbiter of photographic hermeneutics, explains: The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.... Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.

Alvin Baltrop

I walk over the bridge from my apartment building to the Bronx Museum to see Alvin Baltrop. I’m familiar with his work, and it is a beautiful, spare show, but more than anything I’m struck by Baltrop’s poverty. A good number of the prints are in very bad shape, mounted on cardboard, or simply exist as torn fragments. Many of his pictures are tiny, evidence of his limited means, and you have to scrutinize the image to see the figures on the piers: gay men sunbathing and having sex. It is rare to see this kind of show; usually lavish expenditure is what’s on display.

Magic Hour

I walk the dog while listening to novelist and art historian Teju Cole on artist Jordan Weitzman’s photography podcast Magic Hour, a recent discovery. I am learning so much from his unpretentious interviews with renowned photographers and curators, who will talk and talk and give an enormous amount of themselves in response to Weitzman’s gentle prompts. I listen to photographer Mark Steinmetz, and go on to watch an online video of him speaking at Pratt Institute in New York, where he responded to an audience member’s query by saying, “Something can cross our path and you light up to it. You have to cultivate your ability to receive, to be open.” He is open but also guarded and a bit skittish, and his pantheon of influences is 100 percent male. Nonetheless, I feel myself almost unconsciously taking a cue from him, opening myself up to things I’d never get around to seeing, like the Queens Museum’s exhibition of work by Nicolas Moufarrege, a writer and artist who was part of Manhattan’s downtown scene in the early 1980s and posed for Hujar on many occasions.

Allen Frame

Artist, director, and poet Allen Frame became involved in theatre in Boston and New York in the 1980s, and he worked with many downtown actors, directing David Wojnarowicz, among others, and intersecting with Hujar and his circle. Nan Goldin included his intimate diptychs of gay men and friend groups, with oblique texts scrawled onto the mats, in her Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing exhibition in 1989—images that have stayed with me as a kind of mirage for over thirty years. In his Magic Hour episode, Frame reveals himself to be a shrewd observer of the fatuities of the contemporary art world. He recalls “the depth and integrity and glamour” of Hujar’s work, and in person encountering “a superficial edginess and boyishness in an older man that felt a little like snarly immaturity.” To my knowledge, no interviews were ever conducted with Hujar, nor did he write about his work. He comes to us through the voices of others, and Frame’s elegant, measured, Southern antipathy toward the art world strikes me as the closest ventriloquism of Hujar’s spleen directed at the art establishment of his day. (In 2021, well after I wrote the above, art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez unearthed a 1974 conversation between Linda Rosenkrantz and Peter Hujar, and Magic Hour Press published it under the title Peter Hujar’s Day).I can’t stop listening to Weitzman’s podcasts, including his conversation with photographer Justine Kurland, a rivetingly candid speaker who fills her hour with warmth and keen intellect, including this fundamental understanding of the photograph: “All photographs tell the truth, and all photographs lie.”

MoMA Forum

In the process of researching Hujar, I listened to a lecture from the 2016 MoMA Forum on Contemporary Photography called “Queer Photography from Stonewall to AIDS,” in which curator David Campany spoke of the “heady rush” that was critical theory in the UK in the 1980s, and how it eventually developed into a “super-ego of the art world to which [artists] were supposed to be answerable to.” Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture Foundation, added: I was so glad when the 1980s ended and we were [no longer] prisoners of all that. Victor Burgin [is who] I hold responsible for leading a generation of photographers astray, in the sense that he killed the instinct to make pictures because the degree of criticism was so strong.I was definitely among those who came under the sway, and, without a doubt, critical theory diverted and mitigated the flow of my own image-making. Not until the 2000s did I begin to shed some of my inhibitions, and even while I sometimes now proceed as though I’d never been indoctrinated, I’m still, to this day, trying to disentangle what was useful in the Burgin critique and what should be buried.

Tarot Cards

My show with Peter Hujar in Berlin will open in less than a month, and we’ve printed out all the images, his and mine, “tarot card sized” (as Dalie Giroux put it) so that I can try out groupings and sequencing in my studio. In the few shows of his work mounted in his lifetime, Hujar was known to never hang a portrait next to another portrait, a landscape next to another landscape—in short, he mixed things up. I saw this in the two rows at the Jeu de Paume show I visited after Paris Photo, and it’s extremely effective. Now, my own photographs are in the mix. His will be framed, mine will go behind glass, and there are variations in scale. Do I make rules for this hanging, or do I proceed by instinct? I begin to “deal” the small photos on the floor of my studio and move them around and take snapshots of different sequences.

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

We spend a day arranging and rearranging the photographs, and eventually settle on an order and two Hujar principles: the band of images that winds its way around the gallery, and the idea that genres should not abut (though I did end up breaking that rule a few times). Once we begin to hang the photographs, it becomes apparent that, formally, Hujar’s framed images and mine behind glass work well together, something I’d been unsure about.

Tiny Baby

I knew I wanted to include the photo of tiny baby John McLellan, latched onto his mother’s breast, his little hand right there on the breast as well, and her hands supporting his head and lower body. You can tell he is actively sucking and pressing his fingers into the breast. He wears an old-fashioned terrycloth sleeper, the kind I recognize from my own childhood. In a second photo, Hujar pulls back and we see the full dyad: John’s mother, Dina, beatific, lit like a Madonna. John is still on the breast, but his mouth is slack and now he’s sleeping. Dina’s eyes are cast downward and her left hand takes the measure of her infant’s small frame.But it’s the closeup of John that really gets me, makes me think of his utter vulnerability and dependence on caregivers and makes me remember my own tiny baby when I had one, and how difficult it was, and how people can tell you it will be hard but you have no idea until it’s happening to you. Dina could be feeling all this in the photo, or not. We have no idea. I’ve not made much work myself that is directly about motherhood, though I’ve thought about it a great deal and I edited Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, published in 2001. It wasn’t until later, when my son was an adult, that I began to photograph him and his friends and to write about my relationships with them.

Sophie Mgcina 
and Thuli Dumakude

It was not on my original list of images to consider, but while at the Hujar Archive I was leafing through prints and came upon Two South African Actresses (1983). I guessed the women were from the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, an institution founded by the uncle of my partner, Jason Simon: the playwright and director Barney Simon. I showed the image to Jason, who immediately recognized the older actress, Sophie Mgcina, and the play, which he’d seen and worked on in New York, titled The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena. But he didn’t recognize the younger actress in the photo, and so some sleuthing began. Jason and a former student of his who was working in the archives of the New York Public Library eventually uncovered her identity via a listing of a London production of the play, which used the Hujar image in its promotional poster. They identified the younger woman in the photo as Thuli Dumakude, an understudy in the play. The archive later renamed the photograph using the names of the actresses.

Water

The only “famous” Hujars I’d really wanted to include were the Hudson River pictures, but they initially weren’t available. Late in the game, Gary Schneider announced that he would be making estate prints. How to describe the effect of these photographs? We see faces—eyes and lips—and liquid takes on a velvety smoothness and viscosity so that it might almost be a solid: a body of water. Each image seems to have its own personality, and we sense Hujar’s presence as well: a man standing on a pier, with all the connotations of that locale, looking out and taking in the river at his feet. I wonder if he knew when he took the pictures that the resulting images would be so sensual, so corporeal and unearthly at the same time.

Gary

That winter, I took the Long Island Railroad to Ronkonkoma, Long Island, to lie still for eight minutes in a dark room below the uncovered lens of Gary Schneider’s 8×10 camera, while he circled my body, casting beams with a small flashlight, painting my face with light. It was a hypnotic experience, and another iteration of the darkroom performances Schneider has been enacting for decades, writing with light onto photosensitive surfaces. Now I understood better, in its myriad manifestations, the performativity of his work, hinted at earlier by John Schabel.

Coda

I am writing this coda in November 2020, post-election in the United States, with many Republicans still unwilling to concede the presidency. It has been well over a year since I began a chronicle that I thought would end in April, and now nearly eight months have been added to the timeline. This fall, I have installed museum shows in Canada and in Spain, without leaving the country. In the spring and summer of 2020, many of the bigger galleries began to stage virtual exhibitions and platforms for their artists, and Pace Gallery in New York organized one for Peter Hujar in June titled Cruising Utopia, featuring street shots and Hujar’s photos of gay men on the piers. A critical review appeared in Hyperallergic magazine accusing the gallery of mounting an illegitimate, uncontextualized exhibition—a thinly veiled sale of Hujar’s prints, with big purchase dots under each image. The author of the review writes, “Debuting on the last day of Pride month, amid pandemic and protest, Pace Gallery’s Peter Hujar, Cruising Utopia is an online store masquerading as a disconnected, virtual exhibition.” Soon after, likely in response to the criticism, Pace organized a panel discussion with novelist and historian Stephen Koch, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and artists Nayland Blake, Every Ocean Hughes, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, all of whom spoke movingly of Hujar and of their own work in relation to his.Recently, a documentary about David Wojnarowicz premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Gary Schneider alerted me to it, and I was able to purchase a ticket to the virtual screening. The film, titled Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, mines Wojnarowicz’s archive, including his cassette voice recordings and diaries, and even messages from his answering machine—which is how I heard Hujar’s voice for the first time. He sounds boyish and droll. His customary greeting is “hi-de-ho” and his messages are playfully cryptic. The final voice message is the one that sticks in my mind, and its meaning eludes me. But I think it might have been Hujar speaking gibberish Italian, followed by a fragment of operatic song.