Peter Hujar, Divine, from Portraits in Life and Death (Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS))

At some point in college—or maybe grad school, I sought out Peter Hujar’s only published photobook Portraits in Life and Death at New York University’s Bobst Library. I wanted to pour over black and white photographs of filth elders like a pensive portrait of Divine, sans wig and forehead-reaching liquid eyeliner, curled up in a demure, masculine shirt as opposed to the usual slinky skin-tight, born-to-be-cheap stage drag, or Susan Sontag, looking as relaxed as she’s ever been with her arms placed behind her head as if gazing at clouds rather than the flaking paint on the ceiling of a Village apartment. Did I ever find the book, hidden in the art stacks or separated from the others in the library’s special collections? I don’t remember. I feel as if I did, enduring the torture of the library’s uncomfortable wooden chairs to flip through a well-worn copy of this perpetually hard-to-find book. But I may not have. What I do recall, though, is the strong pull toward Hujar and his book, that it was necessary to seek out his archive, proof of lives that had once existed in Lower Manhattan.

I’m certainly not the only one. In the added Foreword to the new Liveright release of Portraits in Life and Death, the first edition since its initial publishing in 1976, Benjamin Moser writes, “As the decades passed, this modest book—thirty photographs printed in an edition of a few hundred copies—would become a valuable artifact. It’s hard to imagine many other $8.95 paperbacks with tattered, coffee-stained covers that would turn up on the internet, half a century later, at a hundred times their original price.” While not a hundred times its original price, this new edition still checks in at an eye-watering 75 bucks, rendering it well out of my price range if I wasn’t lucky enough to nab a press copy. Otherwise, Santa would be hearing from me, though even Saint Nick might balk at the thought of dropping a book down the chimney that includes a handful of grim, seasonally inappropriate photographs of paper-thin skinned, leathery mummies with their deader jaws gaping open. But, why wait until Easter for a memento mori? As with most art books nowadays, the sheer priciness irks me, rendering it unquestionably beyond what any of Hujar’s venerated subjects could pay at the time of these snapshots. Still, the new edition should be celebrated as it’s now easier for intrepid weirdos to dig it out of their local library as someone already did at NYU. Good. I hope they never return it.

Portraits in Life and Death is certainly worth stealing, particularly this version with lush new digital scans made straight from Hujar’s original negatives. The layout of the book remains the same: a perversely macabre yet poetically fatalistic pairing of moody portraits of Hujar’s friends and contemporaries with earlier 1963 shots of skeletons and mummies, their flaking, disintegrating clothing sloughing off their decrepit bodies, sequestered in the catacombs of Paloma. These two sections of the book spookily mirror each other. Many of Hujar’s portrait subjects, like the mummies, lie down. A few like Sontag, Hujar himself, and Michèle Collison, with her bare breasts and raised arm revealing her fuzzy armpits, look remarkably serene. Others, such as actor Jose Rafael Arango with his striking silent film beauty, fix their direct smoldering gaze at Hujar and, by proxy, the viewer. However, many just look downright dead. Downtown composer Bill Elliot, with his head pitched back, recalls Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, and Edwin Denby, poet and dance critic, props himself up with his eyes shut as if he’s ready for his own wake. Add to this morose meditation the original introduction by the always-uplifting Susan Sontag who writes, “Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording-angels of death.” She must have been fun at parties.

No matter how much of a downer, Sontag couldn’t have predicted how right she would be at the time of the book’s initial publishing. Portraits in Life and Death is a tomb; its fascination with photography’s ability to record the unstoppable passage of time as we all hurtle towards death would become alarmingly prescient as many pictured would die in the following decades, several, including Paul Thek, Charles Ludlam, and Hujar himself, due to complications from AIDS. Luckily, not all the subjects are gone. The first photograph, other than Hujar’s introductory leap, features John Waters lazily smoking a cigarette with his arm blurred in the foreground. With his Little Richard-inspired mustache drawn in a flawless line, this is the perfect representation of our preeminent filth elder, his eyes flashing with inner bad-taste mischievousness. You can almost hear him laugh. Several pages later is another enduring filth elder, Fran Lebowitz, who here is the picture of lesbian elegance in her wrinkled button-down shirt, also with a cig accruing a long strand of ash in her fingers. Like many in the book, Fran sits in some vacant space with nothing on the walls, as if she—and the others—just moved into a new apartment, lending the scenes a temporally unmoored quality.

Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz, from Portraits in Life and Death (Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS))

Yet, the dead far outnumber the living in Portraits in Life and Death with only seven still here according to Moser’s count in his foreword. It’s a curious exercise to imagine what the response to the book might be in 1976 when all of its subjects were still alive. Would it be as captivating? Or would it seem like yet another photographer taking pics of his famous friends with a couple of ghoulish deaders stuffed in the back? Would it seem pretentious as hell? It’s impossible to say because the fifty years between have rendered Portraits in Life and Death an incredibly meaningful archive of a since-disappeared and much-romanticized queer creative community, preserved just like those mummies stuffed behind glass. This explains why so many of us find ourselves gravitating toward the book as a resource to stand in for a generation no longer here. As Moser articulates in his introduction, “…the book has come to symbolize a lost utopia, one that was full of other possibilities, other lives.”

While some of the draw derives from iconic figures like William S. Burrough’s grumpy stare on a checkered fleecy blanket, it’s not all celebrity worship. The lesser-known or entirely unknown sitters retain a beguiling mystery such as the woman only known as T. C. who lays on scrunched sheets with close-cropped hair. In lieu of clothing, T.C. only wears jewelry—hoop earrings, a bracelet, and a long necklace that yanks itself over her chest and tangles into her armpit. That’s going to leave a mark. Hujar’s photograph of T.C. is seductive, made even more so by the questions surrounding her identity. As the helpful description of Hujar’s subjects at the end of the book explains, “Nothing definite is known about her or about her role in Hujar’s life, and nothing survives except scraps of gossip. One story claims T.C. was a stripper who would drop by to have coffee with Hujar and tell him her troubles. Another story claims, without evidence, that she was a sex worker, and another holds that she was briefly one of Hujar’s few heterosexual lovers—however, no evidence exists to support any of these theories.” What happened to T.C.? Is she still alive out there somewhere in the East Village? Is she my neighbor? Did she die in the 1980s and 1990s like so many others in the book? No matter who she is or was, T.C. was clearly enough of an integral part of the delightfully ratty fabric of that community, one that many of us feel an odd affinity for even if we never lived it.

Paul P., Untitled, 2024, Oil on linen, 13 x 9 1/2 inches (33 x 24 cm) (Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York)

That feeling—an affinity for an era unlived—also pervades Paul P.’s hazy, romantic portraits of men currently on view in his solo show Sibilant Esses at Greene Naftali, which not only shares many of the themes of Hujar’s book but looks back to the same generation Hujar captures. The majority of P.’s show consists of small impressionistic paintings and watercolors on paper that feature men loitering in unidentifiable jewel-toned spaces that look as if they were illuminated by stained glass or a tacky neon roadside motel sign. These paintings’ diminutive size is a refreshing change from the upsizing at so many other nearby Chelsea galleries. Bigger is not always better as seen here; P.’s paintings convey an intimacy impossible at a more monumental scale. The viewer has to lean in—and likely wants to since these men are pleasingly pretty. A young Rimbaud with flowing hair, bedroom eyes, and plump lips in a leather jacket with a rebellious popped collar stands in front of a furious Season in Hell orange-red background. An Asian man with mussed, I-just-woke-up hair chomps a cigarette without a shirt on, surrounded by a green glow reminiscent of Kim Novak’s room in Vertigo. Another man with floofy hair stands, raising his shirt with his arm half-blocking his face. Is he getting dressed or undressed? Inquiring minds must know! Other boys lie down, like Hujar’s photographs, staring vacantly at the bedroom ceiling or directly at the viewer. Though these men are undoubtedly beautiful, P. doesn’t shy away from flaws, maintaining dark circles from sleepless nights, low-flow shower limp hair, cute gapped teeth, and a generalized hardened look that only Jean Genet could love. Hell, some of these guys, like the one with his eyes closed and mouth half-open in a zonked-out grin, wouldn’t look out of place among the other dancers with black eyes go-go-ing at New Orleans’ notorious rough trade bar, The Corner Pocket.

But, they’re not. Even if viewers chalk the handful of mullets up to throwback hairstyles, Paul P.’s portraits also invoke the dead and a now-passed era. To be honest, I regret that I know from where P. sources his imagery—archives of 1970s gay porn magazines—as it slightly strips away their mystery and renders their meaning a bit too concrete, looking back at the erotic freedom of the 1970s before it all came crashing down into fear, loathing, and sex=death with the AIDS pandemic. The draw to this archive, of course, mirrors the same desire to reach for Hujar’s book. However, I prefer not knowing, only feeling that melancholic longing and nostalgia but being unable to locate exactly where it comes from. Is it P.’s haunting color work that renders the men’s faces in a corpse-like greyscale? Is it the play with shadows cutting dark angles into their faces? Is it the vivid spookiness of certain portraits in which the faces are obscured completely as in one covered with a whitened smog of smoke, bleached blonde hair, or fog as if wrapped up a sheet like one of Magritte’s The Lovers? Is it his smudgy style that mimics fading memories?

Installation view of Paul P.’s Sibilant Esses at Greene Naftali (Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár)

Maintaining this enigmatic quality is perhaps why P.’s other paintings in Sibilant Esses are needed. Alongside the men, P. intersperses several series of abstract-ish paintings. A new body of work portrays near-unrecognizable landscapes, fixating primarily on the patchwork of light and shadow on walls. I had to squint hard at one of the first paintings on view, which resembles a nebulous industrial landscape like the rusted hull of a ship, until I noticed the shadows forming a clothesline dripping with wet laundry. Like the portraits’ inherent romanticism, there is an element of the sauntering dandy flâneur to these works, cruising through alleyways and aesthetically pleasing doorframes.

Yet, my favorite additions to the show are P.’s paintings of fluffy violet-and-blue-tinged clouds flecked with the flapping wings of bats. Bats are not a new subject for P., as previously seen in the two delightfully Goth drawings from the early 2000s of men sleeping with a colony of bats zipping above their heads that were a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s landmark Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Bats also factor into one-half of the only part of Sibilant Esses I wasn’t so enamored by: P.’s sculptural tables. One, entitled Untitled (les chauves-souris), is in the vague shape of a three-part bat while another is named after G. B. Jones, the iconic queercore artist and Tom of Finland for dykes on bikes. While I could do without these thin, reedy, elongated TV trays, the same cannot be said for the bat paintings. In P.’s drawings in Copy Machine Manifestos, the bats take on more realistic forms with little faces or recognizable silhouettes. In contrast, the bats in Sibilant Esses require a leap of faith to even fully commit to identifying these black splotches zipping among the clouds as these winged critters.

Paul P., Untitled, 2024, Oil on linen, 18 1/8 x 15 inches (46 x 38 cm) (Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York)

Their meaning, too, is equally elusive. Are they ominous harbingers of doom and death? A symbol of airborne freedom? A mascot for the freaks similarly rejected by people who don’t recognize how cute they really are? A stand-in for Goth eroticism? Certainly, he wouldn’t be the first for the latter with those “legs chafed by sticky wings” in The Birthday Party’s “Release the Bats.” Maybe it’s all of the above. Mostly, these bats work in tandem with P.’s anonymous men much like Hujar’s Paloma catacombs balance his subjects’ momentarily captured mortality: as eerie and lyrical metaphors for both the passage of time and vampiric timelessness. Some of the men in P.’s paintings may be dead, part of that same lost generation as Hujar’s photographed. Some may still be around. Given their anonymity, it’s impossible to know. Yet, along with Hujar’s subjects and those forever-lingering catacomb mummies, their images remain, forever young, forever preserved, forever waiting to be reclaimed.