Peter Hujar

Draped Male Nude (III) 1979 is a black and white square-format photograph by the American photographer Peter Hujar and is one of his best-known choreographed portraits. Printed to emphasise shadow and contrast, it shows a young male bearded model, seated on a chair, looking down, with a white sheet draped over his shoulders. The lighting and deep contrast lend the man’s figure and the drapery a chiselled quality suggestive of classical sculpture and religious icons depicting the figure of Jesus Christ. The introspective pose is also reminiscent of the early modern sculptor Auguste Rodin’s (1840–1917) monumental carving of The Thinker 1903 (Musée Rodin, Paris). Hujar made few prints and this is a rare example of a lifetime print.

Hujar is a major figure of American photography of the 1970s and 1980s and was closely connected to the countercultural movements in New York of that time. He was particularly known for his intimate black and white portraits and nude studies of the visual artists, writers and performers whom he counted among his close friends and acquaintances (see, for example, Tate P82409–P82412). His work also includes photographs of Midtown and downtown New York (see Tate P82556–7), and domestic and wild animals (see Shaggy Cow, Hyrkin Farm (II) c.1969–85 Tate P82560).

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Hujar worked as a commercial photographer while also pursuing his own practice, focusing from the mid-1960s onwards on the people connected to the downtown culture in which he was immersed: the emerging punk scene, camp performance and the circles around cult music magazines. As his images circulated in the alt-pictorial newspaper tabloid Newspaper and in Interview magazine, on flyers advertising drag performance and, in 1969, a poster for the Gay Liberation Front, they became a familiar part of the East Village’s visual culture.

Hujar’s only lifetime publication, Portraits in Life and Death, was released in 1976. Featuring portraits of his contemporaries juxtaposed with death portraits shot in the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, the book defined the sensitive, classical approach that he applied to all of his subject matter and seen here in Draped Male Nude (III).

Further reading
Peter Hujar; A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Fotomuseum Winterthur 1994.
Peter Hujar and Robert Nickas, Peter Hujar: Night, New York 2005.
Peter Hujar. Speed of Life, exhibition catalogue, Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, 27 January–30 April 2017; Fotomuseum The Hague, 1 July–15 October 2017; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 26 January–20 May 2018; Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California, 11 July–7 October 2018.

Emma Lewis and Yasufumi Nakamori
September 2019