Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark | Raven Row
Andy Warhol called the photographer Peter Hujar “the boy who never blinked”. This exhibition, which focuses on Hujar’s work in the late 70s and early 80s, lends evidence to that view. The show is cacophonously hung, mixing up subjects and chronologies seemingly at random. But, taken together, these photographs form a tightly coherent body of work: linked by their medium (silver print), their format (square), and above all by their creator’s relentless, unblinking focus.
Hujar worked fast and precisely, within strict parameters. He used a handheld camera, and developed everything in a jerry-rigged darkroom in his apartment. He shot what he saw around him, mainly in and around New York City. A single room at Raven Row features a chilling shot of borg-like Sixth Avenue office blocks, a gorgeously composed crowd scene on the steps of a church, very different congregations of ready-to-cruise gay men at the piers (example below) and a miles-wide cityscape, taken from the viewing gallery at the World Trade Center. In the next room you find out all these photographs were taken on a single day - Easter Sunday 1976 - and there are contact sheets to prove it. Relentless.
‘Christopher Street Pier #4’ (1976) © The Peter Hujar Archive
Even if they were achieved through such vigour and skill, Hujar’s pictures can seem distancing. Almost too icily perfect in their composition and exposure. Personally, having just seen so many of them all together, I think this formal rigour is necessary given Hujar’s strong taste for the emotive in his subjects. They’d be too much otherwise.
I don’t just mean his famously blunt treatment of sex and sexuality, though there’s plenty of that on show: a pair of works, in different galleries, show Hujar enthusiastically riding an enormous dildo in one, and bending over to display the blown-out aftermath in the other. In both photos, the slicked-down hairs of his ass, the fronds of the piece of towel he stands on, the veins on his biceps and feet, are picked out with precision and care.
Hujar loved taking photos of heart-meltingly cute animals too, and just as his icy formality cools the hot shock of his sex photos, it also dilutes the sweetness of this set. One beautiful shot of a black mutt called Kirsten, from 1984, for example: the reflection of the gridded window reflected in her upturned right eye is picked out with the meticulousness of a Van Eyck.
‘West Side Parking Lots’ (1976) © The Peter Hujar Archive
Though best known as a portraitist, all these characteristics made Hujar an authoritative landscape artist, too. His attraction for the vilest grimiest rooms and streetscapes possible jars with the formality and even stateliness of his framing. In one scene of mainly empty car parks (above), the accreted rubbish around the sections of barbed wire fencing seem as beautiful as coral reefs. The electric lights glow above. Some signage in the background advertise “leather goods” (perhaps it was a cruising ground?). The whole scene has the sinister, Precisionist quality of a George Ault, an artist who haunted these same streets decades before.
It was all over by 1987, with Hujar dead of AIDS. The show features the famous photos of the artist on his deathbed taken by his friend and lover David Wojnarowicz. Looking at them - at him - I noticed two things, once the immediate shock had died down. Firstly, Hujar would never have let such a poorly-composed and muddily-exposed shot out of his darkroom. Secondly, the dead man’s eyes are open - unblinking to the end.
Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is at Raven Row (London). 30 January - 06 April 2025