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.

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!