Him and Them

Few buildings hold more ghosts; and few books as well.

*Note: All non-architectural photos are captured from books or shows of Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, and Robert Frank. Click names to view portfolios. Many are details of their photographs, sometimes from angles, and not fully representative of the originals.

A rare 1925 survivor of the Yiddish Rialto theaters of 2nd Avenue is the Village East Cinema on 12th Street—a Moorish Revival façade with Islamic-inspired arches and details, including seven menorah framed eyes, one for each of the building’s former lives.

The landmark interior, a 1,252-seat theatre (now divided), shows Moorish, Islamic, and Alhambraic sources, with Judaic references. A gold dome with a Star of David hovers—an eye from above.

Yiddish theatre, ethnic clubs, the mafia-run “homosexual Copacabana,” Vaudeville and Off-Broadway, Burlesque and dance, concerts, and movies. Seven lives of underground culture; safe havens of performance and identity.

And in the 1970s and ’80s, in a second-floor office turned apartment, the studio of photographer Peter Hujar.

This is where he stared into the eyes of his subjects; souls immortalized in the recently re-released, Portraits in Life and Death.

Self-Portrait

Reclaimed in death; pivotal in the downtown arts scene yet poor and anonymous in life. Hujar was a ‘parental figure’ to photographers and artists such as Nan Goldin and neighbor David Wojnarowicz.

Photos below from Peter Hujar: A Retrospective.

Note by Nan Goldin.

Twelve blocks from the theatre, at 7 Bleecker Street was Robert Frank’s Studio. One block further at 24 Bond, Mapplethorpe’s. Five blocks further south, Goldin’s loft. (And nine blocks away on 4th and 1st, my religious Italian and Czech second-generation grandparents—no wonder my grandfather always seemed anxious when he picked us up in front of his apartment in the ’80s).

Across town in Chelsea, nearly 50 years later, Nan Goldin currently has the show You Never Did Anything Wrong at Gagosian gallery—large portraits of friends and lovers juxtaposed with details from classical sculptures and paintings.

Muses connected through the centuries.

Two miles northeast of Gagosian, Robert Frank’s post The Americans work is being studied by the masses at MoMA. Across the country, Mapplethorpe takes a brief trip to Minneapolis. Hujar, Mapplethorpe, Goldin, Frank—four artists interweaved by place, time, and fate.

Hujar’s eyes. 

I stare at Hujar’s portraits as if I’m staring into the artist’s own eyes. I can feel him looking into his subjects; them looking into him. A fleeting moment of peace, recognition—a mycelium acknowledgment. The weariness of an era about.

(Photographing these details from a lower angle was better to remove glare, but it also felt intimate. I imagine this is what his perspective must have been as he interacted with his subjects.)

Sontag writes of the “sexual appeal of death” —photographs “made to appear to meditate on their own mortality… As effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic.”

Susan Sontag.

“I don’t think Peter photographed anybody he wasn’t attracted to, on some level… I think that’s what accounts for the depth of it… There was still some real connection made there. There is a lot of love on both sides of the camera, that I think you can really feel.” Vince Aletti

Detail of note by Nan Goldin in Peter Hujar: A Retrospective.

Is it fair to compare Hujar and Mapplethorpe? Two gay artists of the same era, both succumbing to AIDS, dealing with similar subject matter; one of the stars and one of the shadows. Would they appreciate it or feel stifled by constant comparison? Can understanding the work of one help us understand the other?

Mapplethorpe’s eyes.

Hujar’s eyes are intimate; Mapplethorpe’s eyes are theatrical. Both seem ways of processing trauma, horror, and understanding their relationship with the broader world. Both are vulnerable.

Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mapplethorpe is performing; his photographs self-conscious. How comfortable was he in his skin? Where is the line between reality and charade? Nudity, lust, sensuality are a constant appearance in the work of both, yet it’s Hujar that often feels most naked.

Unquestionably, Mapplethorpe’s portraits are strikingly intimate and deeply revealing, yet there is a sheen of advertising; a gloss. A hint of performance. A necessary performance.

Mapplethorpe, I’m in the room watching; Hujar, I’m participating. Mapplethorpe’s work pounds the door open; Hujar enters.

Hujar’s cover photograph lingers as I visit Life Dances On, Frank’s MoMA show on his post Americans work, a dimly lit, dark exhibition. While The Americans is a youthful attempt to diagnose the outward world, a monolith that peers under the covers of America’s soul, the work in Life Dances On frenetically looks inward.

Fame, mortality, tragedy, life—connecting moments of peace and pain. Peaceful views, scratched and stained.

Photos from Life Dances On and the book Hold Still, Keep Going.

The impact of fame felt throughout—Mapplethorpe’s understanding of the necessity of it all, Frank’s escape from the shadow of it, Hujar’s refusal to acquiesce to its demands, and Goldin’s survival, as she uses every ounce of it to fight. Each the practical path.

And wax poetic about Hujar’s purity and romance, central pillars of his work. But at the same time, tell that to a man who could have used a few more dollars in his pocket during his life. Fame 50 years late.

There’s anger in Hujar’s eyes, part of a swirl of competing feelings, reflections of discontent, mortality, fragility, swaying between fight and resignation.

A brief lifetime of brilliant work is narrowed down to a single book of twenty-seven unflinching, piercing portraits followed by some photographs of skeletons in the catacombs of Palermo, dressed as in life. Two communities—a far-flung connection displacing time and place, and a group of twenty-seven, united by an artist and the theater on 189 Second Avenue.

Click to view portfolios:

Peter Hujar

Robert Mapplethorpe

Nan Goldin

Robert Frank

To purchase: Portraits in Life and Death.

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