Once upon a time, long ago and far, far away, there lived two photographers. Their names were Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon, and though Avedon was twelve years older than Hujar, the two artists worked on similar turf during much the same era in the vanished wonderland of New York. Both were important artists, and though Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon were very different from one another, they were also in some ways very much the same.
And they were friends.
The connection ran deep. A fair amount of Hujar’s best work clearly owes something to the older man. And when his Foundation decided to sell Avedon’s personal collection, the photographer he’d collected in greatest depth turned out to be not the likes of Irving Penn or Martin Munkacsi, but Peter Hujar. The Avedon Foundation sold seven Hujars. Seven great Hujars, if I do say so myself.
But though Hujar and Avedon were friends, they were complicated friends. At one point, they were totally-absorbed-in-each-other friends. Then they could be barely-on-speaking-terms friends. They could talk all night, night after night, and then go for years without a word. They could discuss each other with admiration and respect. They could dismiss each other with contempt. They were linked opposites, locked in difference about how to work and how to live; about magic and money; about the turn of the generations; about glamor and the mundane, about the beautiful and the ugly. About their art, in short.
But in my opinion Hujar and Avedon were linked because each one possessed, in spades, something the other wanted but was destined never to have. Each had some special something. What? I can’t say, but one defining element in the bond was that Hujar and Avedon lived on opposite sides of the great, grey, green, greasy Limpopo River that flows through all the arts in modern life.
The river of Fame.
Are you interested in fame? I know I am—and can assure you that both Hujar and Avedon were very interested in fame, and each devoted a lot of a lifetime to looking and feeling and thinking about it. Their art meditates on fame: on its presence and absence, its glow and its guttering, what it looks like, how it’s worn, how it marks people. Fame was on their minds even when they were not photographing famous people. For each, fame was a Master Muse.
With one huge difference.
Richard Avedon himself was famous. And Peter Hujar himself was not.
Avedon was not only famous, he was chronically, intensely, and incurably famous. More than for any major photographer of his era, fame dominated Avedon’s life like a disease or a destiny. Meanwhile Peter Hujar was not just obscure, he was chronically, intensely, and incurably obscure. More than for any other major photographer of his era, obscurity dominated Hujar’s life like a disease or a destiny. And the radical opposition of fame and obscurity separated and bound them both.
And therein lays a tale.
Over the summer, I’ll be posting some main moments in their friendship. There will be one on how they met and on the master class in Avedon’s studio where Hujar encountered Diane Arbus, Lucas Samaras, and—a major mentor for both Hujar and Avedon—Marvin Israel. One on the first fierce intensity of their friendship, the glory times when they talked all night. One on their later rocky road. Something on Hujar in Avedon’s collection. One on their shared bonds with Marvin Israel, Susan Sontag, and Ruth Ansel. We’ll end with the role each played in the high points of each other’s careers.
It’s a story that touches some major nerves in modern American photography, and nobody has told it, ever before.