Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Matinee: 'Collection in Focus: Peter Hujar'
16 December 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 531st in our series of Saturday matinees today: Collection in Focus: Peter Hujar.
In this 4:55 video, Olivia McCall, the Edith Gowin Curatorial Fellow of Photography at the Morgan Library and Museum, discusses the contact sheets of portrait sessions conducted by Peter Hujar.
Ten years ago, the Morgan's Department of Photography made a landmark acquisition: Peter Hujar's papers, 100 photographic prints and 5,783 black-and-white contact sheets. The contact sheets are of great importance: they span the artist's career from 1955 until his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987 and index nearly every black-and-white exposure that he made. These objects occupy a liminal space between archive and art object; they are process documents that gave Hujar his first glance at each frame on a roll of film. Many of them bear his editing marks, written in varying colors of oil pencil, that indicate a preferred frame or intended cropping of a print. Sometimes, one frame from the sheet has been cut out, perhaps to mail to the subject depicted or to tack up on his own darkroom wall. Lending depth to Hujar's oeuvre beyond the finished prints, his contact sheets are rich in narratives and lend tremendous insight into his creative process.
As she points out at the end of this piece, there is a generation of artists who lives were cut short by AIDS and have not received the recognition they deserved. It is worth our time to revisit what they accomplished.
In Hujar's case, what we gain by looking at his contact sheets is an understanding of both his way of getting a revealing portrait (without props or revealing settings) and his subject's elusiveness. It ain't easy. But he did it.
Years after his death in 1987, his work is getting the recognition it deserves.