Episode 387: Peter Hujar and Paul Thek's "Wonderful World That Almost Was," with writer and Frieze editor Andrew Durbin

Introduction

0:00this is the conversation it's a podcast that goes behind the scenes of in this case the art world of the 60s 70s and 80s i'm michael shaw welcome to the show this is episode 387 with andrew durbin he is the editor of freeze magazine and he is the author of the wonderful world that almost was a life of peter hujar and paul tech which he has been doing the

0:37rounds for over the last few months including several appearances at moma and paul tech by the way is spelled last name t-h-e-k just in case you're looking it up the website for this podcast is theconversationpod.com where i highly recommend you go check out good old analog images of peter's photographs and paul's sculptures andrew later in our conversation talks about the interest in the

1:11film based on the book peter hujar's day which you may have heard of and why it is doing quite well has to do with a craving for authenticity as he put it and i think in light of the preponderance of ai in our lives that an attachment to and a longing for and a appreciation of analog content is really something that we're maybe gravitating towards at the same time and i highly recommend you go to the

1:45episode page for this episode 387 at theconversationpod.com for the first image do not read the caption just go straight to the image and have a look at it it's the book cover of a little life by hanya yanagihara it was a very buzzy popular book in 2015 2016 i think i read it a year or so after it came out and it's an epic story and the cover is an image that peter hujar made and i did not know

2:20what the title of the image was that's why i don't want you to read the caption until after you've seen the image but when i read that book that figure was so connected for me to the main character of the book that in a way that has never happened before so we talk about that in the conversation coming up just wanted to let you have the experience of seeing the image kind of undiluted by the title of the image which kind of gives it away or definitely gives it away so go check that out

2:53i will talk to you more on the back end i'm just going to let you get into the conversation and thank you very much for listening i will talk to you more in a little while chat for now

Conversation Begins

3:05all right andrew hello hello finally we're finally doing it so here's your book want to get that out of the way but we'll come back to that in a second how's your book tour been going so great i i i have to admit i'm pretty exhausted um which is something i suppose you'd want to be during a book tour so this evening i'm wrapping up uh four nights at the moma with a screening of susan sontag's duet for cannibals which will be followed by um a conversation between myself and benjamin moser her biographer so it's been great i mean

3:41the enthusiasm for the book but particularly i think for peter hujar and paul tech has been almost overwhelming so i can only say positive things that's amazing that's amazing we should talk

Genesis of Interest

3:53about the genesis of your getting into these characters or these figures um i do feel like i'm i'm disappointed i'm bummed that i could not find my copy of a little life by hana yanagihara do you happen to know the paperback cover of that book by any chance yes i do i do of um peter's orgasmic man photo from 1969 yeah yeah and i people are gonna have to look it up i'll put it in in one i'll make it one of the episode images but the thing about that image for that book is that as i was reading

4:30that long book i could not stop imagining the protagonist of the book as that orgasmo man from the cover is that something you've heard before yes um i've never read a little life actually so i don't um i don't i don't always know um how the image relates to the contents of the book because i'm not actually even very aware of what it's about uh i wish i i wish i could say more on that basically yeah no but that's that's totally fine i mean i think that it really what it comes down to

5:04is that peter hujar's image uh is so powerful and maybe ambiguous i think is an important way to describe it as well that it really uh is effective if that's the right word as an illustration for the main character of the book so um yeah and and i also mentioned that to say that that is one of the couple of ways that i first became familiar with the photographer peter hujar who is one of the

5:37two subjects of your book along with paul tech the other being david won rowich who became more famous first because of his aids activism uh you can probably give a whole lot of other reasons um i've actually been reading about the jacket that he wore which said something of the effect of if i die uh of aids or if i die don't bury me throw my body in front of the the health department

6:09building um something of that effect uh and that has become a meme of protests apparently it's been going on with covid uh and blm etc so yeah yeah so what was your origin story yeah exactly what was your origin story first with peter and then with paul i first came to peter hujar's work through anoni the singer anoni in 2004 um her album i'm a bird now which received the mercury prize

6:40features peter's portrait of candy darling on her deathbed and i had i had not seen peter's work before at the time i was i was in high school i was living in south carolina but it was such a striking image for me as a young queer person i didn't even know much about candy darling but listening to that album uh and then looking at that image i knew i couldn't even quite say what was speaking to me and in that sort of early days of the internet i did a first preliminary search of the name peter hujar and i i don't even remember what came up but he stuck with me and then when i went to college

7:15and then after college when i moved to new york city he was just one of those artists who came up again and again in the conversations i was having with people my age but also people who were older particularly this sort of an older set of east village artists and novelists who knew him or at least knew of him who might have known david and who would always speak to his importance i came to paul tech not long after i first saw peter's work through anoni's album my memory is that i saw warrior's leg at the hirshhorn museum probably in late high school

7:49and again i didn't know much about his work at all but it spoke to me this was the time of the the iraq war and images of protests were everywhere and it it was a it's a work of protest that is oblique and poetic and you don't quite know what it's protesting but you know that there's a protest happening there and i just fell in love with it i was completely enchanted and similarly with peter when i went to college and when i moved to the city he just was a name you would hear a lot um he's

8:22an artist artist and everyone would sort of refer to paul tech in almost mythic terms and so that's how i became interested in them huh wow you have a long history yeah yeah they stretch back for me

Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

8:35yeah and in describing how well received they are you know now that you've been doing the book running running the book around this the sort of the bigger picture here is that they did both receive a certain amount of recognition in their own time especially paul but uh maybe talk about from the and we'll get more into the details but from the big picture perspective what was it about

9:08their work that maybe more took off after they passed it's a good question so peter who i'll start with peter i think he's he's an easier story to tell because peter was the uh so when peter began working in photography in the late 1950s into the 60s and 70s in onward the photography's relationship to fine art was so complicated um there weren't really galleries that were exhibiting photographers very seriously until the 1970s i mean there are

9:42examples throughout the 20th century but it's not common and most great photographers certainly the photographers he would have been he admired like lizette medel richard avidon primarily worked in a commercial context they also made creative work but that's how they paid the bills peter was someone who tried to do that and didn't quite know how to fit into that world and really struggled because he approached photography from such a i mean for lack of a better term a very painterly way certainly how he produced his images in the dark room is very painterly when you look at that particular process

10:16and he died at a moment when the art world was really finally embracing photography as a serious art form on par with sculpture or painting or whatever it may be um and that embrace of photography has continued into the 90s and 2000s and onward and so posthumously his his work found the world that that it needed to fit into um and so he's just as a consequence risen and risen because of that and i think you know a lot of people who looked at his imagery in the 1960s for example didn't often

10:49know what they were looking at um it disturbed them like the catacomb photos um or it didn't quite fit into the boxes they were used to seeing photography in and now we've completely exploded that and i think younger generations embrace peter because they've grown up in a world in which the kind of photography he was making makes makes perfect sense to them paul tech is a slightly different case because he he did fit into an art world in a very obvious way in the beginning of his career he was exhibiting it at all the the cool young galleries in new york the stable and pace um he

11:22showed it really interesting uh institutions in europe some of the best in europe the problem for him was that as he moved out of the 60s into the 1970s he began to resist the idea of creating what he called rarefied objects and the sort of art world circuit frustrated him and as a consequence he began to make work that was ephemeral that was experience based that was installation uh that took the form of an installation and really challenged everyone's preconceptions of um what

11:54art could be and by the early 90s after he had died mike kelly writes about this in one of the first posthumous appraisals of paul that the conservative art world didn't really know what to do with an artist who had refused the market as intensely as paul had and this is a time when the art world was basically only a market i mean there was radical work happening but this is this is the the time of sort of runaway sales on paintings and as kelly says brilliantly no one knew what to do with these cosmic junk piles and i think i think that has actually continued in some way for paul i think

12:28there's there's such an embrace of his work but because so much of it has been lost because so much of it doesn't look like what you want art to look like from a sort of you know market perspective i think a lot of mainstream audiences still quite don't quite know what to do with him so he's always sort of sat awkwardly in the space of contemporary art i mean that's what attracts me to him it's what makes

Integrity and Compromise

12:53him i think a very interesting person and and artist yeah and they both valued integrity pretty highly or very highly and they both undermine themselves it seems i mean again that's a bit of a generalization but i mean pretty hard to argue against that right yeah i would i would agree i think they were they like i write in the book they weren't interested in the kind of compromises you might need to make to be a sort of art star um they didn't like the whole cocktail circuit element of the contemporary

13:27art world they couldn't they didn't operate that way they were smart guys and they knew people in that world and they knew how to do it um but they weren't interested in it they were interested in the work they were making and they were interested in a degree of authenticity and a kind of um truth almost you could say um so yeah they they they were sometimes their own worst enemies in that sense because they could fight with the people who would want to help them the most which probably created a lot of unnecessary problems for them uh they're both famous for their tempers peter in particular

14:01um and so that that just led to to a lot of problems for them yeah i'm gonna quote from your book uh maybe a lot maybe a little but for for now um i'm gonna go to peter and this could almost be said for paul we can maybe find another one for him but you wrote that peter who cared what quote unquote sold this was advice he later gave david no one rowich in 1981 when david was assembling his

14:32own portfolio of drawings and paintings david had planned to chuck out any provocative works that might disturb potential dealers absolutely not peter said he warned that david should never quote start compromising and adapting to people's taste david recorded in his tape diary that no matter what my taste is and what my ideas are or what my work looks like if i feel it's good there's going to be somebody who will pick up on it exactly yeah and and i think we should get to or we can get to

Peter Hujar's Sensibility

15:07uh sooner rather than later peter and paul's uh sensibilities as you know socially and psychologically so peter i just quoted from your book he was he could be pretty difficult i guess he could it seems like the spectrum was that he could be quite charming in fact it seems like that's one of the ways that you anecdotally heard about him initially peter uh hujar but he could turn on

15:39people in a very harsh way and certainly he alienated uh some of the people in the photography world including diane arbos uh who i guess they had a misunderstanding perhaps but pretty severely among others he clearly acted out i would say from my perspective that that's my take on on the moments that you write about in which he really goes off on his friends and lovers and so on professional

16:12colleagues and i can actually identify with that to the extent that if i had not have not been in as much talk therapy as i have i probably would be doing a lot more of that myself um in fact i i think i have done that i've certainly done it in my family but i've done it with others on a smaller scale so i mean i i feel like i could connect with that level of anger yeah i think i think that's

16:44many people's experience i mean it's certainly mine as well peter was a complicated guy as you said he could be immensely charming i mean it was hard not to fall in love with him it seems that almost everyone i met had had some form of a crush on him um no matter what your sexuality or gender and he seems to have been able to i mean i obviously never met him but when you spend time with him if he paid attention to you that attention was real it felt like something it felt like he was reaching into you whether he was photographing you or just you know sitting at a in a banquet at a bar

17:17and he did have these flares of temper what's interesting is not everyone experienced them and people would experience them quite differently um they weren't always sort of the quote victim of that kind of anger he seems to have had though this sort of reserve of anger that he could always tap into um which i think is different from some of us i don't think all of us are as angry in our day-to-day lives but i think peter had a lot of this anger and he could just fly off the handle um

17:48the the ways that um the way that he seemed to have dealt with that in some on some level and i don't want to over overanalyze him here but it was through photography and i think you can see a lot of the negotiation of that anger happening within the photography i mean the photography is is so beautiful and a lot of people talk about how the experience of him of watching him take photographs you could see how grounded he was particularly if he was taking a photograph of an animal and my read of it is that so much of that anger was sort of dealt with in the within the space of the camera and the

18:23photograph did you get to see any video of peter yeah um i actually screened a video of him last night at the moma um he did a he appeared in his friend gary schneider's uh 1981 film salters cottages he plays a kind of mysterious voyeur figure who walks silently through the woods and looks into a cabin while these other a man and woman are are engaging in some kind of love affair it's not very clear what the relations between all these individuals are um so there's footage of him there there's some footage

18:58of his 50th birthday party um but otherwise he wasn't someone who who appeared in front of the camera to in front of a moving camera i guess moving image camera right too often just curious because in hearing about how charming he was it would you know you would inevitably want to see what he was like you know in real time as it were in addition to anecdotally paul there was probably more of him as himself i know he was he had that tv appearance among other things is that yes right yeah he he he

19:31was so unfortunately the david suskind show which is the thing everyone would love to see from 1967 that that has been lost but he appeared on european television news programs i mean not many but there there are some clips um he did he did more interviews than than peter did and he also i mean because he performed in a band and was a singer there are some audio files of him singing so we have we have more of him on camera and um on recordings than we than we do peter who's our and his charm really comes

20:04through in those um i screened a clip of him speaking to swedish television in i think 1969 and he's immensely charming and sweet and very hippie-ish and very sort of of the moment everyone in the audience was kind of giggling because of how how much he was sort of the kind of quintessential hippie that he's simultaneously rejecting um so he had he was sort of a bundle of of contradictions and and you can see how those contradictions could be so um enchanting and yet also probably pretty

20:36infuriating if you were if you fell afoul of them yeah i mean he was really kind of all over the place i mean i guess he was never correct me if i'm wrong it didn't ever seem like he was like a social butterfly um on you know that end of the spectrum but he definitely was a bit of a recluse i mean certainly the beginning of the book he's living you know he's he's sort of friends with the locals in on this island in italy right and and and he befriends a kid or a kid befriends him

21:12who he does some make some artwork with but despite his comfort with the locals it still seems like he's kind of on his own right and he's often uh leaving the the states for italy or elsewhere to be alone um and it's it's both kind of exotic it's very exotic actually um but also like you wonder to what extent uh you know he just perpetually is getting burnt out you know with the sort of the

21:44social milieus you know whether it's new york that was kind of the first uh exodus he made he made this classic exodus from new york city to to miami right and then later to europe kind of repeatedly so i don't know i mean i just wanted to provide that sketch but maybe you can continue with talking

Paul Thek's Childhood

22:03about you know what his various states of mind were you know i mean on one hand i'll just add finally that um some of it seems incredibly idyllic you know he got away from the a terrible new york winter and went to miami and then later he got away from the terrible new york whatever you know this that and the other to be on an island in italy water he was very drawn to right so yeah i mean i i that's a great sketch i think what i would add is that he he was sort of an

22:34extroverted introvert or i mean he was someone who he very much did value um alone time to use sort of a term like that and he but he was also someone who needed people to be around him so he was he was he was sort of intrinsically a social individual and he he always had lovers and he had close friends and obviously he made a lot of work with other people um he needed to be around he he had this sort of push pull um in his life between needing to be with people and then needing to get away and

23:05that obviously created a lot of issues for him because he could always seem like he was sort of escaping or trying to or running from one place to the next and never quite seeming to land where he felt he should land um and he was immensely he could be immensely dissatisfied with some of the most profound relationships in his life whether it's peter hujar or susan sontag um it was hard to help him in some ways it was hard to love him because he seemed to be someone who questioned the love

23:38you offered um in a very self-damaging way you could say um but i would say that he was someone who he needed to be around people i mean even on ponza which at the time he went was not the developed island it is today but wasn't a completely isolated island um in fact he did go to a completely isolated island beforehand the island of alikuti and he totally rejected that that was too lonely for him he needed to have sort of a mix of people and so i think he really enjoyed ponza because

24:11he could spend a day alone or he could spend a day with a pretty good community of friends and you know neighbors yeah i don't recall i mean it was thinking about peter and his origins and his

Peter Hujar's Photography

24:27uh psychological development over time you talked about the anger putting the anger into the photographs but certainly his mother was an ongoing uh figure of influence on his psychology but paul i know you wrote about it but it's a lot more vague in memory it seemed like it was uh more of a straightforward nuclear family but there were some issues there right to what extent at least from this vantage point now you know well after having written the book do you think about the effect of his childhood on his

25:03psychology it was deep and lasting he uh he had a relationship with his family until his death he was very close with his youngest brother he had a love for his youngest sister his mother died in the early 80s and his father outlived him he the the family he his his mother wasn't out i mean this is sort of in paul's telling of it his older brother was abusive his mother was an alcoholic his father

25:35seemed to be someone who sort of who dreamed of an escape and never quite achieved it at one point he talks about in his diaries his father fantasizing about a chicken farm and of course one of paul's first major exhibitions in the late 1960s in europe he re he put installs a chicken coop next to van gogh paintings and it's sort of this moment where you think he's really is thinking about his childhood and childhood continues to play a theme in his work he works with children on certain exhibitions and his final uh two exhibitions the paintings are actually scaled for children so they're installed quite low in

26:09front of little little chairs you might see in an elementary school so he was someone who was always thinking about childhood and i think was trying to recover something that was maybe lost for him or something that he never was given um and that would be a kind of my sense of his childhood was that

26:30it was not easy to love and be loved by his parents his mother was an alcoholic she was very suspicious she was sort of dreaming of another type of family all the time this is something he complains about and his father didn't even hug him as far as he remembered until paul was in his 20s and that theme of of dreaming and alternatives and touch that those recur in his own work throughout throughout his entire life so obviously it has a lasting impact on him yeah and he became quite the weed smoker

27:06um in fact i was a little sad that you and i didn't get to record on 420 uh per my per my health but um yeah i mean he you know i am i have very little historical knowledge about the history of pot smoking you know over the years but he was definitely i would imagine on the vanguard you know of being like a pretty serious pothead um and that certainly affected his personal and professional relationships right we

27:38could even quote from your book about that but i guess maybe the question is do you feel like he started it you know as a lot of artists of that time and you know up to now do or you know was there maybe and and that he was maybe more susceptible to it because of the things that we just talked about it's a good question i actually don't know if paul is on the vanguard i i i also don't know the history of marijuana use as much as maybe i should my sense of that period of the 1960s was that

28:16he wasn't a total outlier um he certainly smoked a lot and that's a that's a memory that people have of him um but it wasn't um it wasn't totally shocking i think what became more shocking for him like how much he he seems to have come to depend on it um and how much it sort of fed into the problem this is this is true of any kind of drug or alcohol the the problems that it it um apparently resolves actually are are fed by the very substance um so i don't know otherwise you

28:53know i think he i said he certainly chilled out on it i mean it wasn't it wasn't his entire life and he was able to i i would say get it under control um yeah yeah i'm gonna quote from your book just to give a little more specificity uh as neil jenny recalled pace was asking him to produce too much work something glimker arnie glimker of pace disputed after the second technological reliquaries show quote things radically changed glimker said he was

29:27very much more on drugs it was much harder to deal with him he would forget or not remember what he was supposed to be doing unquote there is some truth to this by all accounts paul was easily distracted from the business of art and smoking far too much weed helped alleviate and at times exacerbate his anxiety he said while also enhancing his creative drive so there's that contradiction that you so well described before yeah yeah i want to pivot back to peter again and his mother um there's a great

30:02line i don't have it in front of me unfortunately maybe you can remember it that the caption has for the photograph with peter and his mother something like a friend said something like she seemed to be getting in his way a lot does that ring a bell uh oh yeah his so his boyfriend at the time had said uh she was very good at being unsatisfied and that seems to have been the experience of of so right so the sketch of of paul's mother roughly and you can correct me peter's mother right is that peter

30:38excuse me peter's mother yeah peter who just mother is that he had a terrible relationship with her as a child was emotionally neglected left fairly early on 12 i want to say um kind of reunited with her as a you know as an adult um seemed like that there was maybe there was a period where she was very sympathetic to paul or or other boyfriends um and then there was another period where she was she wanted to disown him if if he admitted to being gay um so there was like a lot of back and forth and

31:10then there's this photograph of him that you read the caption for with you know when he's i guess around 40 or in his 40s with his mother he still seems to have a relationship but it seems like he should have um cut her off and i and i think he he did ultimately cut her off i think it's hard to cut one's mom off even if she's abusive maybe maybe it's even more difficult because she's abusive

31:41because by all accounts his mother could she was strategic she knew when to show her love for her son and in the 1950s when he went to europe with joseph raphael she does i've read her letters to peter they're they're deeply emotional and loving and the letters after that as well which are less frequent she's still wanting to see him um but and there were friends particularly like linda rosencrantz who has fond memories of his mother in the 1950s but but certainly something seemed to change in the

32:131960s either in their relationship or in how peter thought about that relationship because by the 1960s he was pretty clear with his friends that she was a sort of a no-go zone with him he didn't like her he didn't like spending time with her and the very few people who did encounter her like robert levithson who who i quote there talk about how she was just an unpleasant person and very manipulative and even up until peter's death was not someone who despite all of her claims earlier in life about

32:47loving her son did not did not treat him with the actual love you know a mother should and i think that that that that was a struggle for him i mean everyone i mean he in his in his bios that he would submit to magazines he's always inventing this other kind of mother he's always creating fantastic stories for himself and it's obviously a humorous game for him he's just playing around and being being silly but i think it also reveals this deep complaint like a deep maybe agony is probably too strong of a word but a deep sense of loss about about what he could actually claim about his

33:21his heritage and his origins because he doesn't have a father in his life and his mother is there but it is is not there and in her sort of not there-ness is probably the most painful thing of all and so he seems to always try to create different stories for himself um to if not explain it away but to maybe give himself something else to move forward from remind me did he have a sibling or two as well no he did not okay he was an only child yeah as far as we know right got it talking about his work a

33:53bit more going back to earlier on with the black and white in the in the dark room manipulation this is going to be this would fall under the geeky cat you know uh in the weeds or geeky category but can you talk to what extent you became familiar with what he actually did in the dark room and did he kind of discover a lot of these techniques on his own or did he take pre-existing you know uh burning and dodging and whatnot that had already been established and just take them to another level

34:28i love geeking out on this because this was the most one of the most fun parts of the book for me because i am i've never made made photographs before and and haven't since and so but i met a lot of photographers through this book and talked to them about the process in particular gary schneider who was very close with peter hujar he's very important to the book and who is the posthumous printer for peter hujar but also worked with him while peter was alive and you know peter started working in commercial photography studios starting in the 1950s and we can't really know everything that he learned

35:01but that's those are the spaces where he would have learned there were almost every tech every technique that he deployed in creating and printing his photographs he would have learned in those various studios um and he worked in in the sort of traditional fashion studios he worked in more vanguard spaces um and also he studied under richard abaddon for a little while in the in the mid 1960s so he had a sort of um a full range of experience in the dark room he would have learned from a lot of different types of photographers and printers in terms of how he took it to the next level in

35:35himself i think that's where his love maybe of painting and particularly the renaissance and some of the experiences he had in italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s i mean he was thinking about photography in a very painterly way and he applied some of that logic to the photograph in the dark room so he's he's really thinking about shadow and he's thinking about how you read an image and how an image develops over time and that it's not just an instant experience but actually it's something that emerges um and it's really remarkable because you don't see this in a lot

36:06of photographers and what's amazing in his particular work is how different it is between each print that he would make in his lifetime so even recently i was looking at a it's a photograph called altar and it shows an image of a of a cross on the on fire island beach that he and and wilson created together and there there are several lifetime prints but the two that i was looking at one was quite light and hopeful and the other was so dark and stormy and it was almost

36:38these two very different readings of the passion um and he achieved it in the same image and you would never have believed when you looked at one that the other was even possible but he could do that in the dark room and he was constantly experimenting on those lines and he knew that very subtle shifts in contrast could change the meaning of an image very quickly um and that is sort of one of one of the most remarkable qualities in his work because you don't you don't always see that in a photographer you know many photographers they know the picture they want and that's the picture and it will always look

37:12that way was his scale consistently on the small side um because i haven't seen as i'm sure most listeners have not seen much if any peter huja work in person my sense is that they're on the small you know like traditional eight and a half by eleven or maybe a little larger but what what's your sense of the scale over the years he made small to sort of medium-sized images he never made the the the large scale images you see that like say richard avidon made in his portrait of the factory or the american

37:43west he never worked at that scale it would be interesting to imagine that and who knows if he had lived into the 90s if he might have experimented with that but his work is so intimate it very much it needs at least as he created it needs to be sort of medium to small um so yeah there's not much fluctuation and has speaking of that size because the other thing i was thinking alongside that is

Digital Era and Reproducibility

38:09does his work translate well to the digital era or the social media era in terms of its reproducibility or because it's so bespoke i mean that's kind of the way i think about his work it's actually terrible to see it on instagram or what have you what's your take on that i think i mean it it does translate decently and people i mean it's very popular online i you know i'm a bit of a purist and so i would say it's always better to see the prints in person

38:42because you pick up on details that a phone or an ipad or a computer screen really really can't translate and also it really it really depends on what print uh the reproduction is based on um so there are lots of these questions i would say that his work it does work digitally it doesn't have the same effect when you see that sort of silver gelatin and a good example recently there's an image so there's a an exhibition of peter's work right now at the gropius bow in in berlin and it's a cross section of of of all all all of his work from the 1950s to the 1980s and there's this one

39:17image of a car and peter has photographed the side of it and the window has been smashed out and it's the west side of manhattan presumably at night so you it's it's dimly lit what you can't really capture on a phone and i tried this is the sparkle of the broken glass along the the pavement and it's so remarkable how he did that and he he could really pick up on details another example is in the photograph of jackie curtis dead in his casket if you look closely the glitter on jackie's

39:51suit sort of shimmers on the print but a but a digital reproduction it doesn't really come through so there are very key elements in his photographs that you really do need to see in person um that's not to say they don't work because there are some there are some images that he has taken where it it's perfectly suited for a for digital reproduction and is this exhibition that you described in berlin one of the largest or most comprehensive of his work i know that i recall that there was a pretty important show of his at the morgan library but what has been the reach of

40:28his exhibitions like over the last 10 years so it's really kicked into high gear since the morgan retrospective in 2018 which was a brilliant show curated by jill smith um two years ago raven row in london mounted a major retrospective which i believe probably had the most images that have been ever brought together it was curated by john douglas miller and gary schneider and it then traveled to bonn in germany where it's still up right now the gropius bow is a little smaller but

40:59it's still a very very large exhibition uh peter's work is paired with the artist liz de shin but there has been just a total explosion in peter's um exhibitions in the past five years and produces basically since covid um so ortizar has just remounted the gracie mansion show which was peter's final show that he undertook in his lifetime in 1986 that was also shown at frankel gallery in san francisco a year ago and next month at the morgan library they'll do a major exhibition of peter hujar's contact sheets

41:32which are these a really remarkable sort of forensic analysis of how he created the images that that we now know as iconic so there have been a there have been quite a number of shows with by him in recent years and speaking of that you mentioned gary schneider earlier who was a close friend of his colleague of his and now is his what did you say master printer is that the official term he is a master printer and he prints peter hujar's work so my question then is now that his value you know is

42:05kind of starting to skyrocket or or ascend rapidly if you will what is the uh market you know control uh you know protocol around printing the right amount um you know in terms of circulation like money you know what i mean what is what is is he like the decider of that or is it a group of people and what is your sense of like the the angle that they're taking in terms of like in other words

42:36to where on the spectrum is it from uh you know only what's already been printed versus like let's just crank it out to meet the market demand um so the i'll qualify this by saying i don't work on the commercial side at all and i and i actually haven't been part of the conversations in any in a deep in any deep way the estate does print posthumously so the decision to print works posthumously is decided by the peter hujar estate in some instances i know that peter would indicate

43:06the addition size of a particular image so we have a sense that he wanted x number printed um otherwise the the estate has determined that so each image would have a finite edition size i don't know what that would be they they would be able to tell you and obviously there's a distinction between the posthumous prints and then the lifetime prints because the life lifetime prints are just obviously finite um but i will say that so peter understood that his work would be printed posthumously and expected that and advocated for that and encouraged gary to be his printer so

43:41it's not um it's not a matter of um the estate in many ways is following hujar's wish wishes on this right yeah i i mean i guess the subtext of all that or some of that rather is

43:55is the financial gain right from the posthumous prints going to be something that goes to the estate that which in turn you know is like a non-profit you know that that has charities etc or you know what does that dynamic look like and knowing that you're not an expert on this i the honest answer is i don't know um so i can give you a sense so with the way that i worked with the estate was they gave me they obviously gave me permission to write about peter and you don't necessarily need the

44:28permission but it's very helpful when they are supportive and um you know gave me access to peter's archive and to his his contact sheets were at the morgan library and obviously connected to me to people that they knew and the estate has done really amazing work on creating oral histories about around peter hujar's life which they allowed me to use and to quote and all of that in terms of the actual um how let's say the money side of things works with them i'm i'm really in the dark on that

44:58and in the dark on that for paul tech as well i know i would say that i know the estates very well and i would say that they're immensely careful thoughtful people and who would not risk jeopardizing peter's reputation or paul's reputation by doing anything like you know mass producing images or or something of that nature the the way that they've gone about this has been very thoughtful and very strategic and they you know it's it's not just that uh when someone asks for a peter hujar

45:30show someone prints images and they they appear in the show it's a more complicated process but again i'm sure i'm not i'm in no way part of that so i'm actually i'm actually not sure is gary part of the peter hujar estate as well as being the printer i believe he is on the board he is certainly very intimately connected to it whatever the relationship is because he's the only person allowed to print the images so and he obviously takes a request from them and then gary the way gary prints the images is

46:02you know if he's creating a posthumous print he has to think about okay let's say it's an image of candy darling and there are seven different prints that peter produced in his lifetime and they're all radically different gary will make a decision on what the posthumous print will look like based on an analysis of those and that's done in collaboration with the estate that his actual role like i said i think he's on the board but i'm not i wouldn't want to well i'm being quoted because i'm being recorded but i wouldn't want to say that i know that for certain yeah nobody's

46:34going to hold you to the fire with that i i would have maybe brought this up around the tail end of our conversation but i feel like it would be silly to wait regarding legacy you know i mentioned this when we spoke by phone before um you've written this book clearly the way that you have described both of their careers it seems like there is a certain level of um uh canonization that had already happened right but how have you thought about this book's role in their legacies and or what kind of

47:15commentary or feedback have you gotten in your you know taking the book around as far as that goes

47:21it's interesting when i started the book um we were still in the coveted lockdowns and peter hoosier and paul tech were in the in the air but not to the extent they are now linda rosencrantz's peter hoosier's day hadn't even been published yet which obviously became the iris sax film so it was an interesting moment to start the book because they were there was there was i had no idea that the kind of attention they're receiving now i had no idea what was to come and it's been really exciting to see it and i don't

47:53know i'm going to sound naive i don't know what role i played in that ultimately um i think the book has certainly significantly for a lot of people particularly people who knew peter hoosiers were they were unfamiliar with paul tech they might have a sense of him and they knew he was close with peter but they don't fully know it and i think my book has helped boost that and i think i've given a a lot of clarity so there is a lot more to listen to in the almost second half of the conversation

48:29with andrew which you can listen to by going to patreon.com slash the conversation pod and you can listen to the full episode as well as many more for as little as a dollar a month and one of the things we talk about on the latter half is as i mentioned the intro peter who jars day the ira sax film that came out last year uh we talk about the differences between living in new york versus living in london

49:00where he is now and so much more a lot of context for his experience writing the book writing publishing it through for our strauss and drew one of the big publishers out there uh and what it took to get the book written because while he did receive an advance it was not enough to quit his day job being the full-time editor of freeze magazine so that and more is on the latter half of the conversation again

49:33which you can listen to by becoming a patreon supporter thank you so much to those of you who are already patreon supporters i really am grateful for your support and i think that's about it for now thank you very much for listening if you have any recommendations for future episodes future guests always feel free to reach out of course you can follow us not only through the website but at artist podcast on instagram we will be posting images related to this episode and you can share your thoughts

50:05there as well as directly to me whatever you prefer all right i hope you're doing well i hope you are not getting addicted to ai and i hope you are not paying too much attention to the news for your mental health thank you very much for listening i will talk to you again in about a month until then or sooner if you become a patreon supporter until then ciao for now

50:43you