Portraits in Life and Death by Peter Hujar

Liveright

Review by David Starkey

Originally published in 1976, Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death might well be called Portraits of Life in Death or Portraits of Death in Life, so closely intertwined are the two states of being throughout the book. Consisting of twenty-nine black and white portraits of living people and eleven pictures of mummified corpses in the Palermo catacombs, Portraits in Life and Death initially had a very modest press run of a few hundred copies. Yet the volume has had a spectacular afterlife. As Benjamin Moser writes in his Foreword, “It’s hard to imagine many other $8.95 paperbacks with tattered, coffee-stained covers that would turn up on the internet, half a century later, at a hundred times their original price.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration: when I checked Amazon, a “good” used copy could be found for $265. Nevertheless, Moser is right that the book has “that rarest quality of an artwork: time was on its side.”

The introduction by Moser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Susan Sontag, is one of the treasures of this reissue. He does an excellent job of recreating the world of the Downtown New York art scene in relatively few words. This is a place where East Village lofts like Hujar’s are “appropriately ratty: the floor is scuffed, the radiator covered in thick grime.” These days, the area has been “nearly scrubbed away by outrageous rents and corporate cannibalization,” but during the 1970s and 80s it was inhabited by the sort of artists who “abjure money and the fleeting fame the media conveys in favor of something higher—a longer perspective and a self-sacrifice that Hujar called ‘immolation by art.’”

Moser is a good choice to introduce the book, not only because he is a stellar writer who understands Hujar’s milieu and aesthetics, but also because the original introduction of just five hundred words was written by Sontag herself. In comparison to Moser’s, Sontag’s thoughts on the photographs are relatively thin, although she clearly understands his work: “Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death… If a free human being can afford to think of nothing less than death, then these memento mori can exorcise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and panic.”

The portraits of the living were taken in 1974 and 1975, and the subjects range in renown from a nude portrait of Linda Moses, whom Moser refers to as “an obscure teacher,” to filmmaker John Waters, his favorite actor, Devine, famous authors like Williams S. Burroughs and John Ashbery, and Sontag herself. Mostly, though, the portraits are of other gay men in the arts whose names few will recall. Their faces are wistful, pensive, haunted. Often recumbent, they seem lost in another world, a deeper more important one than the rest of us inhabit. And now, of course, we look at them from a great distance. As Moser points out, “half a century after Hujar photographed them,” Time “has killed most of the people in this book.”

Portraits in Life and Death shifts, without warning, from the living to the dead. One moment we are looking at dancer Larry Ree, hairy-chested in a frayed wifebeater, the next we are in the Palermo catacombs in 1963, staring through a glass window into a coffin where a skull crowned with silk roses gapes into the void. And the images don’t get any easier to see. (“Everybody understands [Hujar] is a great photographer,” Robert Mapplethorpe once said, “but when I put something on the wall, I don’t want to look at it and cringe.”) There are shelves of withered corpses, some of which seem to be moaning in agony. Worst of all are the infants, still in their communion dresses, their tiny faces puckered and disfigured. Death, these artfully photographed subjects seem to be saying, is not for the faint of heart.

At $75, this edition of Portraits in Life and Death is expensive, though it’s in a large format and is obviously a bargain compared to the used copies on the market. Moreover, if its many fans are an indication of its value, the book is one you are unlikely to part with any time soon.