Peter Hujar’s Photographs Bring 1970s and ’80s New York to Life

Peter Hujar’s Photographs Bring 1970s and ’80s New York to Life

PHOTO ©1974 PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE LLC, COURTESY OF PACE/MACGILL GALLERY, NY, AND FRAENKEL GALLERY, SF

Peter Hujar’s Fran Lebowitz at Home in Morristown, New Jersey, 1974.


The famed photographer “lived the bohemian dream of becoming legendary rather than the bourgeois one of being rich and conventionally famous.”

While we live in repressive times, political and culture change, supported by maverick artists, persists. The photographer Peter Hujar was one of these fiercely free spirits who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.”

Hujar documented the 1970s and ’80s East Village scene in New York during the tumultuous Reagan and Bush eras. Born in 1934 and thus a contemporary of art-world brand names Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar turned his back on conventional success in the art world. Fran Lebowitz remarked that Hujar had hung up the phone on every photo dealer in the Western world, a poor career move that denied him popular renown.

Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker that Hujar “lived the bohemian dream of becoming legendary rather than the bourgeois one of being rich and conventionally famous.” The photographer hosted his first solo show at the ripe age of 42, just 11 years before his untimely death from AIDS in 1987.

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, curated by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and installed at the Berkeley Art Museum by Apsara DiQuinzio, preserves the artist’s work for posterity. Portraits, nudes, still-lifes, urban and rural landscapes, and animal portraits constitute the more than 140 photographs. Hujar described his work as “uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects.”

These subjects include New York’s artistic and intellectual fauna: Fran Lebowitz and William Burroughs in their beds, watchful and pensive, respectively; Cockette John Rothermel and The Village Voice art critic Gary Indiana, posing in costume; and Candy Darling, the Warhol Factory diva, on her deathbed.

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life runs through Nov. 18, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2120 Oxford Street, Berkeley, BAMPFA.org.

This report was originally published in our sister publication, the East Bay Monthly.