Photographer Peter Hujar lastly celebrated in S.F. present and new movie

Peter Hujar’s images are haunting, glamorous, gorgeously grotesque, emotionally devastating and above all, sincere. 

Now, Bay Area audiences have a singular alternative to immerse themselves on the earth of this under-sung grasp of twentieth century pictures.

With “Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited,” the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco is recreating a now-legendary 1986 present in New York’s East Village introduced by gallerist Gracie Mansion. The 70 images embody portraits of mates, artists and canine; nudes; landscapes; scenes of decaying deserted buildings; and pictures of animals, dwelling and useless. 

“What became obvious to me, living with this show, was that everything was a portrait,” Mansion stated in a dialogue concerning the work for Fraenkel Gallery, highlighting how Hujar introduced that perspective even to inanimate objects and scenes.

The Fraenkel presentation reproduces the unique exhibition structure and even contains some prints from the 1986 present. 

Hujar died a yr after that exhibition, on Nov. 26, 1987, of problems from the AIDS virus that was devastating the queer and inventive communities. He was 53 years previous.

In an ideal little bit of synchronicity, on Friday-Saturday, Oct. 10-11, the Mill Valley Film Festival is screening the brand new movie “Peter Hujar’s Day” written and directed by Ira Sachs. It stars Ben Whishaw because the photographer and Rebecca Hall as author Linda Rosenkranz, Hujar’s oldest pal.

The movie is predicated on Rosenkranz’s e-book of the identical title, wherein she interviewed Hujar solely about what he had performed the day past, Dec. 18, 1974. In the course of the movie, Hujar recounts each the extraordinary and the mundane, from photographing poet Allen Ginsberg to daydreaming concerning the man forward of him in line at a Chinese restaurant.

When I met Hujar’s pal and executor Stephen Koch on the Fraenkel Gallery present opening, he stated that Whishaw completely captured Hujar’s voice in his efficiency. Watching the film, one has the sense that the actor was each channeling the actual Hujar and in addition giving such an idiosyncratic, particular efficiency with every gesture that he was creating one thing as artistically unique because the photographer’s personal work. You get the identical feeling from the movie — Hujar’s nice, candid gossip, asides and his recall of particulars — as you do the e-book.

Although Hujar has come to be acknowledged in recent times as one of many masters of black-and-white pictures and portraiture, he’s nonetheless not as well-known outdoors the artwork world as his peer and fellow homosexual portrait photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. While the 2 are sometimes linked and in contrast due to the revolutionary homoeroticism of their work, it’s an enormous oversimplification of each artists: Mapplethorpe was extra occupied with varieties and archetypes in his depictions of the physique, whereas Hujar discovered magnificence within the explicit of every face. 

Hujar was born on Oct. 11, 1934, in Trenton, N.J., to Rose Murphy and raised by his Ukrainian grandparents earlier than shifting to New York City in 1946 to dwell in an abusive dwelling together with his mom and her second husband. At 16, he started to dwell independently and later entered the School of Industrial Art the place he began apprenticing with industrial photographers.

In 1963, he earned a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to Italy together with his boyfriend, artist Paul Thek, and photographed the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. Those photographs have been later featured in “Portraits in Life and Death,” the 1976 e-book that additionally included images of creatives resembling Thek, writers Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, filmmaker John Waters and drag star Divine. 

The work on view at Fraenkel Gallery by Oct. 25 feels as intimate as “Peter Hujar’s Day” e-book and movie, with the curation mixing photographs of life and loss of life. “David Wojnarowicz: Manhattan-Night (III)” (1985) exhibits the artist who was additionally Hujar’s lover and pal in shut up, his full lips sensual, each freckle on his face realized. Hujar’s portrait of his acquaintance Bob Berg (1985) exhibits his mastery of lighting and shadow, a talent possible honed in a 1967 grasp class he took with photographers Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. I’m obsessive about the definition of Berg’s curls within the photograph and the only mild catching hair throughout his brow. 

Hujar’s portrait of famed Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland (1975) has a softness to it one won’t often affiliate with the ferocious trend character, whereas “Greer Lankton in a Fashion Pose” (1983) exhibits the New York artist reclining, hair cascading behind her as if in a George Hurrell Thirties movie-star portrait. 

But it’s the deterioration proven within the deserted rooms and buildings in addition to useless animal pictures that give the work chew. There’s a way of inevitable finality in lots of of those pictures, notably “Jackie Curtis Is Dead” (1985), which exhibits the Warhol star specified by an open casket.

These works, and the brand new movie, are poignant reminders that Hujar was an artist taken too quickly.