Thursday, January 10, 2013

Hujar

Cindy Lubar as Queen Victoria, 1974

Charles Ludlum as Camille, 1974

Diana Vreeland, 1975

Butch and Buster, 1974

Robert, 1978

Sheep––Pennsylvania, 1970

Nicholas Abdallah Mouffarege, 1980

Untitled, 1981

Gary, 1981

Ethyl Eichelberger, 1983

John Heys, 1985

Untitled, no date

Favorite pages from Peter Hujar: A Retrospective published in 1994 by Scalo (already used on an earlier occasion in a different context here). This exhibition catalog gives the fullest treatment up to the present of a still-undervalued photographer who died of AIDS in 1987. One of the accompanying essays contrasts Hujar with his far more successful contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe – "in Mapplethorpe your glance ultimately ricochets off a perfect glossy surface in which the formal perfection barely is kept in balance by the aggressive content. Mapplethorpe created models par excellence; Hujar was interested in emotions, in "being."   

And from another of the essays – "Peter Hujar did not systematically search and represent: he did not join in the structuralistically oriented investigations of the seventies: he was interested in only one thing in the one thing standing, lying, sitting, growing, jumping in front of him: man, woman, shoe, horse, water. With uncanny but perfectly undramatic concentration on this one subject, almost always in the singular, he was apparently seeking out essences, not in the sense of personal traits, but rather as elements intrinsic to contemporary existence: the void, time, boredom, transformation, presence."