"The Pictures: Securing Peter Hujar's place among the greats," by Stephen Koch, Harpers, May 2018
Found this wonderful 2018 essay by Stephen Koch after reading his obituary in the NYT yesterday. Koch was the friend Peter Hujar entrusted with his archive when he died in 1987. In the years since, Koch worked to establish Hujar's reputation as a photographic great.
Two parts stuck with me. First, Koch's description of the haphazardness of artistic success:
"You are managing a body of work that you know is wonderful, but you are confronting a brick wall. Success waits on the other side. What to do? You look for cracks in the wall. There aren’t any. You try to dig under it. You try to climb over it. No way. So you try to knock the wall down. You kick it, you slam your body against it, thinking you must be nuts, this is so obviously futile. Besides, it hurts—a lot. Your body is bruised. Your shirt is in rags. Your shoulder is bleeding. And the wall, of course, hasn’t budged one millimeter.
Then, a hundred feet away, an entirely different brick wall, one that you’ve never even noticed before, suddenly topples over. That’s how it was. I never stopped banging, yet every really important event in Peter’s resurrection came as a surprise, off somewhere in the middle distance."
Then, this, Koch's recollection of Hujar bidding his things farewell, which made me think of GOODNIGHT MOON:
"Walking had become hard for him, but he began to shuffle around that big, ascetic space as if he were alone. Instinctively silent, I sat in one of the brown corduroy easy chairs that were his sole concession to ordinary comfort. He reached his kitchen space and addressed the big blue table in the center. “Goodbye, table,” he said. Then he turned to the stove. “Goodbye, stove.” The sink came next. “Goodbye, sink. Goodbye, refrigerator.” I sat still, wishing to be invisible. Leaving the kitchen, he crossed to his darkroom and, standing in the doorway, peered in. “Goodbye, darkroom. Goodbye. Goodbye.” Shambling back into the living space, he addressed everything there individually: chairs, bookcase, books, records, stereo, television.
He ignored me.
He turned to the bed where he had sweated through the agony of one opportunistic infection after another. It was immaculately made. “Goodbye, bed,” he said gently. “Goodbye.”"
