Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar’s Kindred Eyes

In a new book, The Shabbiness of Beauty (2021), the artist Moyra Davey interposes her own photographs, both recent and decades-old, with those of the photographer Peter Hujar. There are a surprising number of harmonies: intimate portraits set against blank interiors; an interest in the surface of, and movement across, bodies of water; pictures of isolated body parts. Both artists capture an empty Manhattan, photograph lone high heels, and are drawn to handsome, pensive punks, as well as other forms of life – including horses, dogs and chickens.

The book’s 55 pictures are only attributed in end notes yet, although Davey compiled lesser-known or previously unseen images from Hujar’s sizeable archive, the sumptuousness of his prints is hard to mistake. Davey’s are often lighter and more ethereal. More salient is the subtle way these photographs place the past in the present tense. By mingling her own work with Hujar’s, Davey creates a sense of time that is richer than could be offered by a single artist’s archive, unearthing a capacious continuum of resonance and resemblance.

Drawn from an exhibition that took place at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin in February 2020, the volume also includes a visceral essay by Eileen Myles that reflects, among other things, on the disappearance of people, places and eras. Myles bridges the generational gap between Davey and Hujar, but remains more committed to ‘entering her photographs, not his’. Davey, born in 1958, is part of a cohort who, as she writes in an afterword, ‘came of age artistically in the post-modern era’ and were ‘all self-consciously trying to signal that what’s going on behind the camera – the emotional register, the labour register, the thinking register, the mechanical register, the risk factor’ is as ‘important as the image itself’.

Hujar was not this type of artist. He set out to be a commercial photographer in the latter half of the 1950s, first working for fashion and design magazines, and eventually honing the technical mastery of his later portraits of downtown intellectual and artistic personalities, as well as, less famously, his documentation of the autonomous zone of the piers along the west side of Manhattan and his profoundly soulful photos of animals. (Davey includes a number of her own images of horses made in the intimate mode of Hujar, writing that she ‘limboed’ her body through an electric fence in order to get the shots.) Hujar was in no way as mediated and self-reflexive as Davey, who often works in series and transmutes images and ideas through her films, her brilliantly erudite writing and her mail art.

Within this book, however, the edges of authorship have been sanded down. Davey sequences the photographs in a way that allows us to follow various iterations of a category across the visual passage of pages: a woman, poised topless over a bathtub with her breast in shadow, to another woman, topless and voluptuously reclining in the Chelsea Hotel, to a close-up of a breast being suckled by a baby and an even closer shot of another breast, slick with water and hair. These bodies are sensual and sturdy. The ‘shabbiness’ of Davey’s title might be more applicable to the animals in the book, who seem vulnerable and forlorn. Perhaps she also means to evoke the inevitable vanishing of beauty that makes photographs slightly dolorous documents. ‘In a way, the total picture of our time is the abstract sum total of the awareness of all the creatures who live in it,’ Myles writes.

Hujar’s work, uncertainly positioned at the time of his death from AIDS in 1987, has since become part of the photographic canon. Davey nonetheless manages to reinvent it with strangeness and dissonance here, so that it may live anew, again.

_{Main image: Moyra Davey & Peter Hujar, The Shabbiness of Beauty, 2021. Courtesy: MACK, London}