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Peter Hujar was photographing the hip, intelligentsia, underground, gay and straight crowd. He photographed people who had power in that scene. The actor and writer Charles Ludlam, who was in The Big Easy and Museum of Wax, the theatre artist Lola Pashalinski.
These people were there from the early days of bohemia; they were people who wanted to be beatniks when they were growing up. They weren’t exactly hippies or flower people. He photographed smart people, and I don’t mean smart in the old-fashioned sense of the “smart set”. I mean brainy: brainy bohemians that had a style.
He got good people because everybody thought he knew what he was doing, and that they were going to look good in his pictures, because you always looked good in Peter’s pictures. Even when you were dead, he made you sexy. These are not ugly pictures. Someone like Diane Arbus, who probably influenced Peter, didn’t take ugly pictures either, but she could certainly make people look frightening. Here, if anybody looks frightening, it’s because they look so smart.
Peter made my portrait (top) in 1975, after my movie Female Trouble had just come out. Fran Lebowitz and Lisa Robinson introduced me to him. I think we shot it in his loft in the East Village. He was a very sexual person; I would see him out in the crazy sex clubs in New York. He was handsome and smart and he wasn’t a separatist. He hung around with straight people, women, everything, which I always did too. So I felt completely comfortable with him. I was relaxed. You felt safe. And that’s what you have to feel to get in bed with somebody while they take your picture. He was an inch away from you; he didn’t say a lot. It didn’t last for ever.
He didn’t want anything either; Peter didn’t care about money. He was not a hustler at all, as far as going out and getting jobs went; he was not good at that.
He took what came to him and he was not known as a photographer like he is today. Even after he died, in 1987, you could get his stuff fairly inexpensively at auctions. It took a while for people to realise how original and great he was.
Now, I have one of his photographs of a big garbage can filled with trash hanging in my living room. It’s almost formal. I thought it was the perfect image to have in the house that trash paid for.
Charles Ludlam
Charles Ludlam was around right at the very beginning of the avant-garde theatre scene in New York. He was influenced by the performance artist Jack Smith, and was in turn a big influence on me. I would run away from my home in Baltimore and go and see Smith’s performance pieces and movies. Ludlam was part of that whole crowd when Andy Warhol was around. It was a scene. I see this picture and I just remember how great Charles was. And God, we were all so young.
William S Burroughs
Burroughs always looked old and dressed old, and Peter caught that here. He looked like a banker even when he was 20. I knew him from the punk scene, where he was reinvented in the 1980s. It was Burroughs who called me “the Pope of Trash”. That’s like God himself anointing me. He invited me over for a visit once and passed me a joint. Who doesn’t smoke pot when it’s William Burroughs offering? Later on, I looked in his bedroom and saw he had a single bed and he had been reading a paperback version of Guyana Massacre, Charles A Krause’s 1979 eyewitness account of the mass suicide in Jonestown. He served me warm vodka in a washed out peanut-butter jar. I was so impressed.
Susan Sontag
Sontag looks beautiful here. She looks, almost against her will, pretty. And he doesn’t show the grey streak in her hair, which is like taking a picture of me without my moustache.
Peter’s talent was to catch you when you were not playing yourself. And all of these people knew how to play themselves.
Divine
This picture of Divine is what he looked like, in real life. He always wore that one piece garbageman’s outfit. I always called Divine “she” when he was in female costume and character and “he” when he wasn’t. This portrait was taken right after the release of my movie Female Trouble, where he played a spoiled schoolgirl who runs away from home and falls pregnant.
The picture is kind of haunting. He looks very pensive, in a way. This is Peter catching him off guard, not being the “Divine” character, but the person I knew. The only other time people saw him, he was this flamboyant, insane psycho that we invented to scare hippies. But in real life, he was kind of a gentleman, and a good host; even quiet.
Palermo Catacombs
I look at the dead in Peter’s photographs and think, “That’s quite a crowd, too.” You might need some La Mer cream on these people. I tell you, don’t ever get an open coffin. It’s a really bad idea.
These photographs also remind me of the saddest thing, said by a character in Joy Williams’s short story “Honored Guest”: “The dead just forget you.”
“Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death” is at the Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice from April 20 until November 24
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