Even if you aren’t familiar with the name, you’ll more than likely know at least one Peter Hujar photograph – taken in 1974, his image of ailing Andy Warhol muse ‘Candy Darling on her Deathbed’ was used by Antony Hegarty for Antony and the Johnsons 2005 album ‘I Am a Bird Now’. That image doesn’t feature in this show, but death does. Lots. Not only in ‘Jackie Curtis Dead’ (1985), another Warhol acolyte (laid to rest wearing a splendid buttonhole). But also in photos of the legendary leftfield long-dead names who sat for Hujar, their friend – underground stars of a New York scene that itself feels long gone.
There’s John Waters muse Divine, or rather Harris Glenn Milstead, sprawled, unadorned, among cushions. Artists Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, Hujar’s boyfriend at the time of his death of complications accompanying AIDS in 1987. William Burroughs looks haunted, but then he always did (and in fact had more than 20 years to live after Hujar’s 1975 portrait).
Hujar didn’t go in for gimmicks. His photographs are black and white, classically-inspired portraits of subjects who rarely do more than look back at the lens. The images are almost always square, while the sitters are anything but. It’s the startling combination of uniformity and non-conformity that keeps you looking.
Martin Coomer