PETER HUJAR
Peter Hujar, Dead Gull, 1985 © 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich.
Afterimage by Pia Eikaas:
There is a seagull in Peter Hujar's exhibition Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row. It's Sunday noon, 23 March 2025—spring, with warm, damp air, soft and almost raining. Last night, my friends and I went to see The Seagull (Chekhov) at the Barbican in London, with Cate Blanchett in the lead role. Actually, there are no lead roles, it is directed by Thomas Ostermeier. When I was younger and still in the closet, I used to date an actor—he was my best friend, and still is—and we’d travel from Copenhagen to Berlin to see Ostermeier's productions at the Schaubühne. Ostermeier, the enfant terrible, wrestling with old classics like Hamlet and An Enemy of the People, was mind-blowing, addictive, destructive, and truth-seeking.
Last night, something strange happened during The Seagull. It wasn't as good. The German, now middle-aged enfant terrible, the British rigidity of Chekhov’s three kinds of humor and ideas clashing—it wasn’t interesting, just half there. (Ostermeier kills the seagull because he has nothing better to do; he kills it because he can).
On stage, Cate Blanchett is always great, but this time, she seems like she doesn’t want to be there. In this deconstructed landscape, she comes across more as a still image than a moving actress. She poses, afraid to stop moving, so these sequences of poses become a contact sheet of an actress in a midlife crisis (quote play) grappling with aging. (Skin, body, form—a fragility…) Nina or Irina? Or is there something else at play?
Many of Peter Hujar’s subjects never got to grow old; the AIDS epidemic wiped out a whole generation of potential mid-life crises, swaggering old queers, memories, and knowledge of how to live other narratives, other ways of aging—myths that were never passed on. A void, a void that could have been avoided if the world hadn't been so homophobic, xenophobic, and capitalist. (How is it that we are still swimming in this dark pool of ignorance today?)
Charlie Porter writes a fictional yet very real story about this loss of a generation, and about gardening in the shadow of high-rises, in his new novel Novia Scotia House. I went to the launch where he spoke about care and kindness, and how gardening, tending, and volunteering are ways of reconnecting—with community.
That bird, that seagull on the beach—Peter Hujar photographs people and animals with the same intense interest, care, soul-searching, and love. He photographs friends, lovers, dogs, horses, writers, actors, scars, desires, dark waters, empty streets, piers, staircases, holes—holding them in squares where it’s clear, in the present, vibrating, time collapsed without blinking.
The image of the seagull (is it a seagull?) and the images of Cate Blanchett on stage merge. I think Peter Hujar would have photographed Blanchett if he were alive (or at least I would have liked to see him do so). The tonal qualities of his photographs—loss, death, presence, love, and affection—will stay with me for many years. The seagull, growing old, not getting old, the free and the trapped. Which is which?
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.