Plinth

Throughout Peter Hujar’s exhibition Eyes Open in the Dark, on view at Raven Row until 6th April 2025, co-curators Gary Schnieder (friend of Hujar), John Douglas Millar (Hujar’s biographer), and Alex Sainsbury (Director of Raven Row) pair images of death — the carcasses of cats, birds and the erosion of Hujar’s own body — with images of life, vitality, joy. From John Flowers laughing on the toilet in devil’s horns and plastic high-heeled mules to Richie Gallo in head-to-toe fishnet, each image is vivid proof that a life was lived.

Yet it is impossible to ignore the shadow of the AIDS crisis, given the time period in which many of these images were taken — the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Eyes Open in the Dark, we see Hujar’s community’s lives and deaths through his eyes. His portraits capture friends — writers, artists, and prominent figures in the LGBTQ+ community — with a fondness and presence. A photograph of Hujar’s partner Paul Thek, dressed in a grey hoodie with unkempt hair, feels incredibly modern, like you could bump into him next time you’re at The Divine or Dalston Superstore.

It is because of this immediacy that we are startled by the stark reminders of death. One wall sees the oddly upright and feathered figure of ‘Dead Gull, 1985’ sharing space with a toddler in ‘Young Boy Crying, 1979’. In one room, Lynn Davis touches up her makeup with a Q-Tip – on her way to some party, it is easy to imagine – while in ‘Jackie Curtis, Funeral, 1985’, the actor and drag artist is laid to rest with a chrysanthemum in full bloom on their lapel and a drawing of their drag makeup stood up inside their coffin – a face looking back at us. In Hujar’s photographs, life and death are in communion with one another.

The way these photographs are presented—through a combination of pigmented and gelatin silver prints—is crucial to this act of remembrance. Hujar’s reluctance to exhibit these without the expertise of his friend, and master printmaker, Gary Schneider, stemmed from his desire to ensure that the ink sank deep into the viewer’s consciousness. The same ink that renders the fragility of the scar tissue on Pascal Imbert’s torso also brings out the contours of Ethyl Eichelberger’s face, enhancing both Ethyl’s presence and Pascal’s mortality. Unlike standard machine printing processes, where the ink is pressed onto the page in a uniform manner or mechanically scanned onto it, printmaking requires a guiding hand. The inconsistencies and personal markers of Schneider add a level of depth that could not be achieved otherwise.

As I walk between tightly packed rooms at the private view, I come across a portrait of Lavinia Co-Op, an East London performance icon. I remember last spring when she sang a rendition of ANHONI and the Johnson’s ‘You Are My Sister’, against N’s vibrant piano in the bar full of portraits on the edge of the Thames. This memory resurfaces when I come across a portrait of trans icon Candy Darling in the next room, a photograph which resembles the one that was later used for the cover of ‘I Am A Bird Now’ (2005) of Candy in her deathbed. The present laps at us from behind the past.

The suffering we see in these photographs is neither archival nor detached but rather tethered to contemporary struggles. The eyes of Ethyl Eichelberger or Cookie Muller make me ache for the people in the portraits, and remind me just as strongly of the people I ache for now. With recent US legislation making it impossible for trans people to update their legal documents in a life-affirming change, I think about the struggles faced by my friends. After I leave Raven’s Row, I text my friend P asking her to come back to see these photographs with me.

In Eyes Open in the Dark, Hujar writes us all a letter from his grave. He says: remember those we lost, and love those that remain.

By Elida Silvey