#charles ludlam

[Peter] Hujar, too, has become metabolized in the twenty-first-century imagination as an icon of a mythic time, an impression that is perhaps more starkly made by the tenderness of his portraits. The East Village arts scene of the ’70s generated the kind of formative work that younger generations built identities and worldviews around; the subsequent AIDS crisis meant that many of the artists who made that work died young—among the subjects in Portraits, both [Paul] Thek and Charles Ludlam died of AIDS. Some of Hujar’s other famous subjects, like the artist David Wojnarowicz and the Warhol Superstar Candy Darling, would die at thirty-seven and twenty-nine, respectively. Their untimely ends have the effect of preserving these figures for us as they were—brilliant, tragic, and gone before they ever got a chance to disappoint us. For all the peculiar specificity of his vision, any encounter with Hujar’s work now bears the weight of this history: several decades on, we see not only the virtuosity and potential of Hujar’s world, but also the tragedy that was coming. “Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery,” wrote Susan Sontag in her introduction to Portraits’ first edition, written from her hospital bed just hours before the first of her surgeries for cancer. “Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording angels of death.” When Portraits was published, the first reported AIDS case was still five years away, and Donald Trump was just a sleazy, nightclubbing landlord. Would Hujar’s subjects have looked different if they’d understood themselves to be teetering on the edge of a catastrophe? The faces in his portraits bear a range of emotions—they look inquisitive, or mischievous, or very tired. To me, looking at them from across a long historical distance, they also look a little naive. 

Tonight: A Ridiculous Revival