Peter Hujar

There's a fine exhibition currently at the Morgan Library in NYC of Peter Hujar's photos, which I just got to see on a trip back east. It's a very well put together retrospective of close to 150 photos taken throughout his life. There's a short video here (LINK) giving some background, and here's a website featuring a good number of pages of his photos (LINK). Toward the end of the video, the narrator uses the word "introspective," which I think is apropos. The personal nature of his stuff, from the portraits he's probably most known for to his urban and often emotionally dark cityscapes, I find really gripping. He's an artist of a time and place for sure. He documented and was part of NY's East Village art scene from the 50s through the 80s. He had a close relationship with Avedon for a while and Avedon was moved enough by his work to have 8 of his prints in his personal collection. He was obviously influenced by Arbus as well. I think the universality of his work lies in the vulnerability he finds in his human and non-human subjects as well as his own vulnerability which seems to come through in the photos.

Your thoughts welcome.

It's a strictly personal anecdote but when I was back home the day or two after I had a sleep paralysis, an experience I've never had before and never had after but it convinced me at that very moment that a spirit from those catacombs had followed me home and was lurking between the movements of the open window summer curtain blows.

Maybe just serendipity! :p

Seriously, though, nice when photos hit us with such personal recall.

When I used to come back to NYC for vacations during my college years, I would explore parts of the city I didn't know about when I was younger. Hujar's photos recreate some of my feelings at doing that, the kind of intimate alienation I felt in some of what seemed like strange places to me, as well as the sexual charge of those days in the 70s when folks were first coming out but it was still pretty new and scary . . . somewhat uncharted territory for many of us.

Thanks, Fred

As long as it was brought up.

sleep paralysis

My personal theory is that the vast majority of UFO abductions are people with cats kneading them during sleep paralysis.:)

I mean, did you ever look at those faces on the "aliens"?