Content area
Full Text
To date there is no full-length biography of the photographer Peter Hujar, which is surprising given the tumescent interest in his work of late. The most sustained account of his life remains that given by Cynthia Carr in her biography of David Wojnarowicz, an account that takes in the span of Hujar's life, but is understandably focused on the later period; Hujar only met Wojnarowicz in 1980, seven years before his death at the age of 53. Carr portrays him as a complex, ascetic, often-difficult mentor to a younger generation of downtown artists, lingering on the indignities and mental deterioration he suffered while dying from complications arising from AIDS. However, Hujar's photographic style was, in its essential elements, fully formed by the early 1960s and the dominant journalistic focus on him as a downtown figure of the late 1970s - the comparisons with Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin for instance - is not always conducive to the interpretation and art historical situating of his art.
Hujar's training in the superior fashion photography of the 1950s - he took a masterclass with Richard Avedon - and his reconfiguration of that training towards a more complex intent, mirrors Andy Warhol's move from fashion illustration to 'high art' around the same time. Carr mentions glancingly that Hujar respected Warhol's work and appeared as one of his Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and it can be argued that the methods and approach to temporality...