Stephen Koch

When he met Richard Avedon in 1967, Peter Hujar was already well launched as the Great Unknown of American Photography. He was 33 and a mature artist, quite obviously poised to be some kind of Somebody in the coming generation, There was a substantial amount of museum-quality work in his portfolio: for example, he’d done the now-famous Palermo Catacomb Series four years before, and his plangent images of retarded and impaired children—which I suspect influenced both Avedon and Arbus—were older than that.

At that moment, Avedon was in a transition from youthful éclat to eminence. He’d left the cradle of his career, Harper’s Bazaar, the year before, and so had Harper’s former art director, Marvin Israel, who also served as Avedon’s artistic right hand. Both men were looking for some connection to the next generation, and to that end, they set up what became a watershed event in photography of the time. The Master Class. Not a master class. The Master Class—a weekly meeting in the Avedon studio on the Upper East Side, in which Avedon and Israel gathered under their wing the young photographers they believed were going to dominate the next generation in New York.

Avedon may have been remembering his own career. Back when he himself wasn’t yet quite Somebody, he’d taken just such a master class given by Marvin Israel’s predecessor at Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch. The class had been a revelation—and his entrée to the magazine.

Given the teachers, students, and guest speakers attending, the talent-quotient in the Master Class was somewhere near stratospheric. The students included Deborah Turbeville, Hiro, Chris von Wagenheim and Hujar. Diane Arbus visited repeatedly: Hujar’s friendship with Arbus dates from this moment, and all through the later sixties they could often be seen together, endlessly wandering through the Village, cameras slung around their necks, talking and snapping. Another visitor was Lucas Samaras, who in 1967 was a crossover figure between sixties surrealism and photography. At first glance, Samaras may look less important to Hujar than Arbus, but I wonder. In those days, Samaras was showing his neo-surrealism at the just-born Pace gallery, as was Hujar’s then partner, Paul Thek, to whom Samaras had clear similarities. At the same time, Samaras was also moving toward photographic self-portraiture, and showed the Master Class his personal collection of 19^th Century French pornography.

Sixties surrealism; self-portraiture; erotica: a mix made for Hujar. He remained friends with Samaras for the rest of his life.

Finally, there was Marvin Israel, one of the key figures in modern photography; a mentor and tastemaker who in his way may have been more important even than Brodovitch. Israel was, first of all, indispensable to Avedon’s career both in fashion and his gallery work.  Beyond that, he mentored and guided the entire artistic trajectory of Diane Arbus, both before and after her death.  He designed the most important book by Lisette Model. He influenced on the generation that followed Avedon and Arbus, such as Deborah Turbeville.

As for Peter, I can think of nobody (apart from Lisette Model herself) whom he esteemed more highly than Israel. He saw Marvin as a sage; when Peter was dying often grieved that nobody, nobody but Marvin, (who’d expired a year before) could ever really understand his work.

Finally, it may be that the most important thing about the Master Class was its moment. Not so much what took place, but when.  For most readers of this post, the interval between (let’s say), early 1966 and early June 1968, the week during which  Warhol was shot on one day and Bobby Kennedy assassinated on the next, may feel like pre-history. Or that very well-worn cliché: the (yawn) sixties.

Yet for many of us, for the people in my generation and Peter’s, that moment really was the annus mirabilis, a  catalytic time when everything seemed to rush together and fuse and leave life transformed. It felt that way to me. I think it felt that way to Peter. Maybe it felt that way to the whole culture. Certainly when that murderous first week of June 1968 hit us,  even though we were still the same country we’d been in 1965, and still the same people, somehow everything was drastically different.

I think Hujar’s prime sixties moment may have been The Master Class. However much or little he learned in it, he came out transformed. More completely himself. More mature. Less alone. More with it. More fully empowered for his life, his time.

Avedon, Israel and that year of wonders, 1967, had provided him with all that. Not bad.  Not bad at all.

At some point Peter told the Master Class that for his project he would do a series of nude self-portraits, images of himself naked and running.

With a stick of dynamite up his rear.

Avedon was delighted. Marvin Israel was horrified. He “groaned and moaned.” But the series got made, and here are two images from it, which present a portrait of the artist as a thirty-three-year-old, in his sixties moment.

Without the dynamite.

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.

It’s Friday at the end of a week of discovery. I’ve  just dug up not one but two chests of buried treasure.

When I became the executor of Peter Hujar’s estate in late 1987, I was excited, overwhelmed, and I knew….well, nada. My job was crystal clear. Here was a major artist, a peer of Arbus and Avedon and Mapplethorpe —an artist they saw as their peer—whom most people had never heard of. My job? Make the work known. Get Hujar into his proper place in the canon.

The murky part was how. Peter’s estate was penniless and in debt. He had no dealer. He had alienated most of his collectors, and as Fran Lebowitz noted in her eulogy, he had “hung up on every important photography dealer in the Western world.”  Some very smart people thought Peter had made a big fat mistake by giving me the job at all.  I’d written a novel about the art world, The Bachelor’s Bride, and as he sadly confided to me shortly before he died: “All of this is so much like that book of yours.” But in fact I was clueless about the real art business, and I was learning it all from scratch in a tiny room of our apartment, climbing over boxes while confusion reigned.

I decided I had to clear the decks. Literally, there was just way too much stuff in that tiny room.  I decided to put everything that wasn’t essential to running the estate into storage. I would keep right beside me all—or what I thought were all—of Hujar’s black and white 16×20 prints. They were the living center, the beating heart of his achievement. I would also keep with me all his negatives, every one of which was, thanks to Peter, in perfect chronological order. I wasn’t necessarily going to do anything with those negs, but they were too precious to be let out of my sight.

But the other stuff? I would keep everything—his old wallet, his social security card, his contact sheets, his datebooks—but I didn’t have to keep it all in the tiny room. I bought two very sturdy shiny classic cruise trunks with brass fittings and locks. I very carefully filled the trunks with “all the unimportant stuff”—from the contact sheets to the datebooks. I locked each chest with its little brass key, and slid them to the archival depths of a locked storage cage in our basement.

Where they have remained, in the dark,  since 1988.

Monday morning, the Archive’s indispensable man, IFA doctoral candidate Matthew Israel, and I decided that this was ridiculous: Those chests had to see the light of day again. Now. For one thing, it was dawning on me that there was some significant number of color images by Peter Hujar “out there,” about which I knew nothing. Zip. When, what, where, how? I had no idea. Maybe the answers were in the chests. Besides, come on: the contact sheets of this major artist were in a basement. How about just a little professionalism?

So off we went, spelunking for buried treasure.

The chests were right where they’d been left, heavy and dusty underneath piled cartons of two decades’ dreck. Their once-shiny brass held firm, but it was entirely corroded. In swirling dust we dug the chests out from under teetering boxes.  Of course, their little brass keys were lost long ago. We ripped off the locks with a crowbar.

Then we opened the tops, and found wonder upon wonder.

There were the contact sheets, undamaged in their yellow Kodak boxes, all in the perfect order in which Peter left them. But there was much, much more: tiny boxes filled with hundreds—hundreds upon hundreds—of color slides, an entire body of work about which I had known next to nothing. There was a large, completely forgotten box of small, exquisite black-and-white prints, all made by Peter, some of them images I had never seen before, others perfect prints of Peter’s most beautiful classics. And then there were the letters. Folder after folder of letters.

I haven’t even begun to assess this treasure trove. Let me share just one of many details. There are letters to and from Peter’s teacher, sometime friend, and committed collector, Richard Avedon. (Hujars comprised the largest single selection of pieces by any photographer in the recent auction of Avedon’s fabulous personal collection.) In April 1975, Peter wrote Avedon asking him to sit for inclusion in Peter’s now-classic book, Portraits in Life and Death. Avedon declined. “Dear Peter…Best of luck with your book…BUT…I’m saving my face for another photographer…. Dick”

Joke, of course—as if for Avedon sitting for a portrait was like losing his virginity. Still, think about it.

I should feel shame for having let these treasures languish for two decades, and please believe me, I do feel shame. But four days after opening those chests, my shame is still swamped in excitement and the joy of discovery.

Memo to artistic executors: You don’t know what you have. You can’t know what you have—not at first, and not ever. Only the shape of events to come can tell you that, and while time does its work, there are no unimportant boxes.