Stephen Koch

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.