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.

Last Friday afternoon, the writer C. Carr interviewed me for her forthcoming biography of the late David Wojanrowicz, the phenomenal young painter and writer, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 38, and who was the surrogate son of Peter Hujar.  We had a lot to talk about. David and Peter’s lives and deaths were momentously intertwined.

David Wojanrowicz was the decisive artistic relationship at the end of Peter Hujar’s career. Peter was (I think) the decisive artistic relationship in the beginning of David’s. Their story is one of the most fascinating in the annals of the downtown eighties scene in New York, and when I heard the news that Cindy Carr had signed with Bloomsbury to write David’s biography I felt a shiver of excitement, sensing that this story had maybe found its storyteller.

And when I told Cindy I’d been waiting for her call, she seemed mildly surprised, and that surprised me a little. This encounter had to happen.

“So how much time do you think you’ll need?” I asked.

Cindy is really terribly polite, not in the least intrusive, and so she murmured something about maybe an hour. One hour? “I think,” I said, “we’d better plan on two. At least.”

In fact, we barely got started in just under three.

Peter and David met in a bar: a plain old pick-up sometime in the winter of 1980-1981. David was twenty-six, a driven but directionless kid battered by dazzling but anarchic gifts that he was not yet even close to knowing how to handle.  And like Peter, David’s physical presence was a little intimidating: you could feel the heat of his youthful anger feeding and his youthful need feeding each other’s fire.

Peter was by then pushing fifty, the strong silent eminence of Deep Downtown.  He was a somebody who knew Everybody, and yet he was chronically alone, an artist who who’d produced several decades worth of masterful artistic achievement known to Everybody from Arbus to Warhol to Mapplethorpe—but to nobody else.  He could make art.  He could not manage a career.  From the outside, he looked commanding.  Inside, he struggled with depression, and woke up many mornings thinking he was maybe getting to the end of his rope.

The older artist with his achievement and the younger artist with his possibilities transformed each other’s destinies, and their story is a tremendous biographical read.  I am not going to steal any of Cindy Carr’s thunder here, but I do want to note the broad outline of how I see their friendship, and while I’m at it, clear up a myth.

The myth is that David and Peter were partners.  Wrong.  True enough, step one was a pick-up in a bar, and David and Peter certainly did have a sexual fling.  It lasted maybe two months.  Maybe less.  David’s actual partner, then and to the end of his life, was an admirable and very together guy named Tom Rauffenbart, who is now David’s executor and heir. I know of no evidence that David ever once considered leaving Tom for Peter, and David soon let Peter know (probably to Peter’s regret) that he did not want their obviously life-changing relationship to remain sexual.

After that, the really powerful phase of the friendship began: mutual artistic transformation.  Peter looked at David and saw life-redeeming young talent.  David looked at Peter and saw life-directing achievement. Peter’s achievement gave David’s talent direction and definition.  David’s promise gave Peter’s achievement rejuvenation and vindication.  David needed someone who cared passionately about what he might do.

Peter needed someone who cared just as passionately about what he had done. David needed direction–shaping, seriousness, discipline.  Maturity, in a word. A father.  Peter needed someone whose boundless energy and boisterous talent gave him new life, and in whose success he could rejoice without a second thought.  In short, he needed a son.

What you see here is a taste of what went between them visually.

Book lovers who are convinced that civilization is coming to an end got one more reason to pound the table last week when the Washington Post announced that it will shut down its freestanding book supplement, Book World, and fold its reviews and coverage into other parts of the paper. That is not good news, and when I heard it I gave that well-pounded table a couple of good, solid whacks myself. I began my career writing reviews; I have often reviewed and been reviewed in Book World. I count as a friend the dynamic Michael Dirda, who was for many years the force behind the supplement. (Happily, Michael will keep on writing his wonderful book column for the Post; the paper will continue to publish an abundance of reviews; and—very revealingly—Book World will appear as usual on line.)  The National Books Critic’s Circle has greeted the news of Book World’s demise with an orchestrated chorus of outrage, to which I join my voice, which only yesterday cursed the closing of the New York Sun and the end of what was—hands-down—the best coverage of the arts I have ever encountered in any newspaper. Morning coffee will never again reach the heights it knew with Adam Kirsch and Francis Morrone and Eric Ormsby were on my breakfast table.

Yet I for one do not see civilization coming to an end quite yet.

Is it too banal to point out that all journalism—certainly including literary journalism—is right now in the process of transformation? Is it complacent to notice that this is not necessarily all bad?  The truth is that journalism’s two prime tasks in civil society—disseminating information and shaping opinion—have never been more lively in this country than they are at this moment.   To cite my old classmate and contemporary Bob Dylan, (if anybody wants to hear, someday I’ll fill you in on Dylan and me) whatever’s not busy being born is busy dying. People are coming to books very differently than they did in 1975, or 1995, but they are coming to books, and through changes in technology and the critical vocabulary that represent a vast democratization of the discourse that nothing can stop. It’s true, we don’t know where we’re going, and most what’s done swims in a shore-less and smelly sea of mediocrity. But speaking as somebody who was around in 1975, take it from me, the sea of mediocrity was also shore-less in the good old days, and it didn’t smell one bit sweeter.

Meanwhile, much is much better. I can get to a Michael Dirda column (and his archives) in seconds. There was a time when months would pass between American publication of a piece or review by the superb Clive James—for my money, the best all-round cultural journalist now writing in English. I can now check in with Clive James—see, hear and read him—any time I want. I have his books endlessly to reread; but I also have his delicious television interviews, and his current commentary, not just the stuff from the big guns but easy throwaways like his recent musing on K.D. Lang and Roy Orbison. I count easy access to www.clivejames.com  as something less than the end of civilization.

Journalism is dying right now because it is being reborn. This is as it should be.  Some of the changes make me sick and others make my heart leap with anticipation. Any transformation is both a birth and a death. That can be scary, and sometimes I’m scared too. Just remember: Longinus—who was appraising books even before me—understood that fear is an aspect of the sublime.

So-Book World, (print version), fond farewell. We saw some sweet times together, didn’t we?

Mike Dirda—don’t miss a pitch.

Clive James—take it to the limit one more time.

And everyone else, repeat after me: There were no good old days.

Susan Sontag’s journals, Reborn, Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, is just out.

Susan was a close friend for forty years, and it was in Susan’s living room that I first met the photographer Peter Hujar, whose artistic estate I now manage. Among connoisseurs, Hujar’s reputation as a major artist is at last in place, but he’s still far from a household word. (He will be.) When I try to explain who Peter is, my quickest shortcut to the shock of recognition is to say, “I bet you know that famous portrait of Susan Sontag? You know…the one of her lying on a bed looking in space?”

Then they get it. “Oh…yeah. Susan Sontag lying down? Right. I have seen that. A great picture. He did that?”

Yes he did, and the picture is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York , one of Hujar’s great portraits.

You might be interested to know that the Sontag portrait came into existence at a major crossroads in three lives: Sontag’s, Hujar’s, and mine. Here’s how.

The portrait was made in 1975, and was intended from the beginning to be part of Hujar’s book, Portraits in Life and Death, the sole book he published during his lifetime. Peter had known Susan since 1963. In 1966 he’d done two quite beautiful portraits of her, but the 1975 image was made for a specific purpose, bound to the theme of his book, which is how portraiture—Hujar’s art, par excellence—is a meditation on mortality. How explicit—verbally explicit, I mean—was this theme for Peter as he worked? My guess would be quite. After all, the book’s title, (which was his), puts the idea right smack in front of us; so does the way the book mixes portraits of the leading figures of New York’s then downtown avant-garde with his series of images—literal portraits of the dead—made in the Palermo catacombs in 1963. In 1975, Sontag was just ending the torturous process of writing her book, On Photography. So the moment for a portrait was, to say the least, a ripe one for them both. Either then or very soon after, Peter asked Sontag if she would write the introduction to the book. She agreed. Then, typically, she procrastinated.

Right around the time On Photography appeared, Sontag suddenly had her first encounter with the series of cancers that, thirty years later, killed her. At the time, I was pretty close to Susan: close to the emerging diagnosis of breast cancer, to the medical crisis, to the personal tumult; all of it.

The night before she had her first exploratory surgery—which within days was followed by vastly more invasive surgery—I accompanied Sontag’s son, David Rieff, and some other friends to check her into Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. I remember helping settle her into the hospital room. She and I had been talking about the fear of death; I had mentioned to Susan how in earlier eras there had been such a thing as a guide to dying—for example, a book by the seventeenth century divine, Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, once tremendously widely read. I know, I know: this must sound like pretty lugubrious chat to be having with someone about to have surgery. But Susan was Susan. She flinched at nothing. She talked about what was on her mind. And that night, dying was on her mind.

Sontag was scheduled for surgery very early the next morning. People came and went, but for some reason there was a period of an hour or so when I was left alone with Susan. Sitting up in the hospital bed, she suddenly said that before her surgery she had to attend to one bit of unfinished business: Peter Hujar’s introduction. She’d promised it; it was past due. She had to do it now. Right now. She asked me for some paper, and we got some wide flat something to write on in bed. While I sat paging through a book, Susan set about writing the introduction to Portraits in Life and Death. In less than an hour, she was done.

Here are some lines from what she wrote. “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably…Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death. I am moved by the purity and delicacy of his intentions. If a free human being can afford to think of thing less than death, then these memento mori can exercise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic.”

Sontag handed me the handwritten text, and asked if I would please type it up and get it to Hujar the next day. Soon the room filled up with people again. Not long after, the night nurse told us that we would all have to leave. I remember walking down the sidewalk outside Memorial Hospital with her son and a little bunch of friends, the handwritten introduction to Portraits in Life and Death in my pocket.

As we walked, we glanced back at Sontag’s room on maybe the fourth or fifth floor. She was standing up there, framed in the light, waving to us. I had never before seen her looking lonely. Not so lonely, at least. She kept waving and waving until we turned a corner and disappeared.

The next morning, I typed the text and delivered it to Peter Hujar at his loft at 12th Street and Second Avenue. At this point Peter Hujar and I were still acquaintances rather than real friends. For example, I’m pretty sure that morning was my first glimpse ever of the place where he lived. I gave him the two or three typed pages and quickly filled him in on Sontag’s condition. I don’t remember that I even stayed to hear his reaction to them.

But we were all at our crossroads. I mark that exchange as the transitional moment between merely knowing Peter Hujar and being his friend. Sontag’s surgery that morning showed that her cancer was exceptionally advanced, aggressive, and life threatening, and so she began her long, valiant, and finally losing battle for life. Peter and I, meanwhile, lived in the same neighborhood. After that, whenever we crossed paths, as we often did, we stopped to talk. Our conversations grew longer, and steadily more absorbing. Pretty soon we were having coffee. Then dinner. I cannot say precisely when we became, as it were, virtual brothers, friends for life. But I do know that during that spring of 1975, one of the great friendships of my life was in transition, and another was beginning.

And the pivot was this picture.

Talk to you next Friday. True, it will be the day after Christmas, and the most important grown up in my life and our daughter will be on the road. But there will be a posting anyway. Meanwhile, I’ve read Susan’s Reborn once, and by next week will have read it twice.

Who knows? If I have something fresh to say, I may say it.

With this first blog on www.stephenkoch.net, I’m about to dive into a pool where I’ve always wanted to swim. I’ve wanted to write a column for as long as I’ve been writing, but back when the only path to a column was print, no editor was either wise or foolish enough to offer me the chance. This blog is my chance.  I am bouncing on the board. Will it be a swan dive or a belly flop? We’ll see. Luckily, there aren’t many people watching.

Just you.

You know who you are, but who am I? To those who have come here looking for the site of Stephen Koch that awe-inspiring mountain-climber, snowboarder and skier, you’re way off site. You want www.stephenkoch.com, and you’ve got www.stephenkoch.net. I’m Stephen Koch, the writer, and I’m a very different fellow from the amazing athlete from Wyoming. I’m scared of heights.

In any case, my site may perplex you. The array of my books seems so scattered. I sometimes think what I’ve done looks like an unsolved jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece or two. There’s history. There’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. There are two novels. There’s art criticism. There’s stuff about Andy Warhol. So what is my literary identity?

I think I have an answer to this question, and I am going to make it my first post.

It’s true: I do write history, but don’t see myself as an historian. I write fiction, but don’t see myself as a novelist. I write about art and literature, but don’t see myself as a critic. In fact, I refuse to see myself as any of these things. I will not slap one of those labels on my tee-shirt and dump all the rest of what I do wastebasket of some second-class status. And to call myself just a “writer”—just a plain “writer”—clarifies nothing. What author, what blogger, isn’t?

It’s more helpful to point out that everything I’ve written is subtly unified by one common element. Almost all of it either is, or is about, storytelling. I write narrative. My history is narrative. My criticism is narrative. My fiction is narrative. If I have anything to offer in any of those areas, it’s because my main talent, for better or worse, is for narrative.  I believe in the mind’s power to define experience, consolidate passion, and tell the truth through a unified sequence of events. I think narration is one of humanity’s most valuable creations, a prime vehicle for entertainment, art, and thought in which those three things constantly mix and merge. I know that’s an idea under constant attack, but you’ll find it defended here. Those who claim that narrative is always illusion, propaganda, reaction, or social repression are wrong, and I reject wholesale the standard academic effort to build walls between narrative as art and entertainment and thought. “This is too entertaining to be art” is noxious. “This is too smart to be entertainment,” is meaningless.

Of course, I’m not talking here about quality. I know perfectly well that many— most—stories serve up stupid, vulgar art; dull, unproducible entertainment; and/or crappy, worthless thought, and that much of it is illusion and propaganda. That’s not my point.

I have two points. One very big. Another much smaller.

The big point is that narrative is one of the human mind’s most essential instruments, and that its majestic power sweeps across every genre.

My smaller point—much. much smaller—is that when it comes to yours truly,  whatever the subject, whether it’s criticism, history, or real things re-imagined, my mind looks for and usually finds some sort of  story, and I am almost always at my best working within it.

So there it is: my the first post’s grand pronouncement.

Let’s come back down to earth. From now on, there will be a posting at this site every Friday, or else I’ll be too sick to get out of bed.  It will be about be history, or fiction, or art, or any other subject about which I think I have something worthwhile to say. Don’t look for commentary on the news. Don’t look for pit-bull political arguments. If I say nothing about Obama’s inauguration, trust me: it’s not because I don’t care. It’s because I have nothing to say that a hundred thousand others haven’t already said.

In the first months especially, I’ll be feeling my way, looking for what you find valuable. I’ll need feedback. So let me begin with a promise. I will respond promptly and individually to each and every e-mail that comes to me through this site. The response may be short, and it may not be what you want to hear. It may be just a “thanks” or “no thanks.” But if it doesn’t come, call me a liar.

And I’ll talk to you next Friday!