Hujar’s fascination with the interplay of life and death dated back at least a decade. In 1963, he’d traveled with his lover, the painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to the Capuchin Catacombs in Sicily, where mummified bodies were preserved and often posed in lifelike suspension. The crypt offered Hujar evocative portrait subjects and the opportunity to experiment with light, shadow, and the theatricality of the human figure. Candy Darling enacts these concerns, presenting a body on the threshold of mortality yet incandescent with calculated glamour. The image sanctified Darling in the queer imagination as eternally alluring, eternally 29.
“If they can be said to have shared a subject, it was almost certainly death,” Andrew Durbin writes of the artists in The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, a joint account of their entangled careers. Death is not only the leitmotif of their work but a tragic near simultaneity in their biographies. Both men died of AIDS-related illnesses less than a year apart: Hujar in 1987, at 53, and Thek in 1988, at 54. Their legacies have diverged sharply since. Despite a retrospective at the Whitney in 2010 and frequent inclusion in group shows, Thek remains somewhat subliminal in American art history, partly because of his years abroad and partly because many of his improvised, transient assemblages were lost or destroyed.
Durbin, the editor in chief of Frieze, deliberately restricts the time span of his book to the roughly two decades before the rise of AIDS. He begins just before Hujar and Thek met in the 1950s and ends in 1975, when they had an inexplicable falling out and rarely spoke again. This was a time when their lives “were filled with light and color, exuberant personalities, extraordinary art; they were beloved, even if loving them was difficult at times.” Durbin writes of their deaths in an epilogue, but as the book’s title implies, Wonderful World resists the grim inevitability of AIDS narratives and tells a story that is sweeter, more domestic, and cliquish. Among the “exuberant personalities” that formed the artists’ inner circle were Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and the various luminaries who sat for Hujar’s camera. His work persists less as a document of 1970s New York—an era that remains a cultural infatuation—than as a record of how he and his milieu collaborated in their own self-mythologization.
Neither had an idyllic childhood. Hujar was born in New Jersey in 1934, the son of an absentee father and a waitress mother who couldn’t raise the boy on her own. She sent him to her parents’ farm, where he frolicked among cows and geese and vegetable gardens. This pastoral upbringing informed his earliest photos—of cows in a field—and would echo in some of his later images of animals and landscapes. Thek was born in 1933 and grew up on Long Island, the second of four children. His father, George, was a prototypical “man in a gray suit” who commuted to work in the city, leaving his wife in the suburbs to booze and dash off sad poems. Durbin relates a vivid anecdote about George wearing a head device in the evenings to help “reactivate” nerves paralyzed by cancer. “The gadget would interrupt the television signals, prompting a fit in Paul’s mother, who might otherwise have fallen into an alcoholic stupor that Paul thought was a kind of trance.”
The photos he took during the trip “have a soft, almost neo-romantic tone,” Durbin writes, comparing them to the cloistered, coded tableaus that PaJaMa—Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French—staged in the 1930s and ’40s along East Coast beaches. One portrait presents Thek barefoot and boyishly coy on a forest floor, while another captures him plaintively indoors. “Here are the many faces a pretty boy is supposed to make when trying to charm the camera,” Durbin notes. The session allows him to introduce an idea that will recur throughout the book—that Hujar’s radiographic eye could penetrate a sitter’s artifice and reveal something like a soul: “His camera reached into you, rummaged around for parts of you that you might not have realized were there, parts he then brought forward, into the open—the raw and undigested, the real.”
Eroticism was another signature of Hujar’s and Thek’s work, perhaps even more pronounced than death—or, rather, inseparable from it. In the late 1960s, Hujar began documenting the “little death” of orgasm. (His 1969 photo Orgasmic Man, a close-up of his friend Dutch Anderson climaxing, was later ubiquitous as the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 bestseller, A Little Life.) For Thek, eroticism emerged obliquely, a by-product of his sculptures’ viscerality. He sometimes told an anecdote about stumbling upon a woman masturbating to his sculpture Meat Piece With Warhol Brillo Box when it was included in a group show at MoMA in 1966. That assemblage—a hunk of wax made to mimic raw, sinewy beef, a tube poked in its middle, planted inside one of Andy Warhol’s infamous Brillo boxes—carries a sexual je ne sais quoi, although it wouldn’t titillate any but the most fetishistic of butchers. As Thek recalled, “She leaned forward and touched her lips to the tube extending from the Brillo box. He never forgot the slurping sound she made.”
Hujar’s images also depend, however, on a controlled performance. In his photos, sitters are attuned to the camera and finesse their presentation accordingly. Contrary to the notion of Hujar as a clairvoyant who could excavate a subject’s essence, he was a studio photographer by inclination—a kindred spirit to Richard Avedon, with whom he studied in 1967 as part of a master class. Just as Avedon’s white backdrop became a psychic vista, so Hujar’s apartment functioned as a domestic theater for people’s rehearsals. In his portraits, electrical outlets, baseboards, scuffed floors, and stark walls add accents of drab realism that only underscore the illusion of unmediated truth playing out in front of the camera. All of Hujar’s subjects are in drag; some of them literally, as in his portraits of Ethyl Eichelberger, and others in the practiced faces they assumed when posing for posterity.
His rapport with animals is another refrain in Wonderful World. “Peter communicated so fluently with animals as to seem to possess an almost magical linguistic power, like that of Saint Francis,” Durbin writes, adding later that “with animals, Peter waded into mystery.” To my eyes, the drama of Hujar’s animal portraits is overstated, though there are exceptions. In his 1985 photo of Will, a shar-pei with a deeply corrugated coat, the dog looks wistfully off camera, as if satisfied that he’s finally being taken seriously. Another image shows a cow emerging from darkness, flash-lit, nothing else discernible except the silhouette of a skeletal building and foothills in the distance. The photograph startles; you don’t know who is confronting whom—both you and the animal are fellow wanderers in the field of night.
Thek first exhibited the meat pieces at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964. The show was, briefly, a curiosity, and made Thek an artist to watch. Still, almost none of the pieces sold—then or ever. The work unnerved museums and collectors, who likely didn’t appreciate Thek’s mischievousness. As he explained the pieces to a journalist, “I see it as a form of barbaric humor—a violation of humanism.” He elaborated in a conversation with Artforum in 1981, connecting the Reliquaries to an effete estrangement from real-world concerns:
After the Stable Gallery show, Thek returned to Europe, where he had bit parts in a few spaghetti Westerns and embarked on a loose body of work called Processions. These temporary, ritual-like actions and sculptural arrangements were ephemeral by design. Thek, who already had a mystical bent, had begun speaking about art as a spiritual and collective experience rather than a permanent object in a gallery. By using perishable materials—paper, fabric, flowers, cheap paint, candles, food—he made works that couldn’t easily be bought, preserved, or owned. In one work from 1969, for example, he toted a wooden cross on his back through the countryside and hung it in a tree. Many of these pieces no longer survive except in photographs.
Hujar’s style remains a template for how serious thinkers want to be seen: austere, self-possessed, authentic, as if depth registers on the mask of the face.
In the summer of 1975, Hujar photographed Thek for the final time. One of the images from that session appears in Portraits in Life and Death. Compared to his earlier images of Thek, this one seems off-the-cuff, as if captured between setups. Thek looks at the camera open-mouthed, his expression flat, light gently halving his face. It’s a portrait neither flattering nor ugly, but ambiguous—much like the artists’ relationship at that point. “It was hard for anyone to put their finger on where things began to go wrong between them,” Durbin writes. “Probably, it was a gradual accumulation of moments, of slights and snide remarks, most of them hidden from the record.” Their split would be permanent, although Thek didn’t realize it then. “Any time you want to make love, just ask me,” he told Hujar. There’s no evidence Hujar ever accepted the offer.
In one of those coincidences that almost make you believe in cosmic irony, Hujar died in room 1423 at Cabrini Health Care Center—the same room where he’d photographed Candy Darling on her deathbed more than a decade earlier. His friend and former lover, the artist David Wojnarowicz, photographed Hujar’s body in the immediate aftermath. These close-ups of hands and feet and Hujar’s face—mouth ajar, eyes cracked—recall images that Hujar himself would have taken. Less than nine months later, Thek was dead, too, another casualty in that cavalcade of loss that brought to an end a certain era of queer self-invention. “Nothing lasts forever, other than paradise,” he’d once written. He might have put it more honestly: Paradise is what’s left after you’ve tried everything else.
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