The Singular Vision of Peter Hujar

Artist and master printer Gary Schneider was a close friend and occasional subject of Peter Hujar, the New York-based photographer famed for his empathetic photographs of artist and writer friends, drag performers, nude lovers, farm animals and cityscapes. Since Hujar’s death in 1987, Schneider has been entrusted with making prints of his late friend’s work, a process he describes in engrossing detail in his recent book Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom (2024). More than three decades spent poring over Hujar’s photographs has given Schneider an unrivalled insight into how their austere elegance was achieved. Here, he remembers what it was like to work with Hujar, the ‘eccentricities’ of his prints and how their years of friendship and collaboration inspired his co-curation, with John Douglas Millar, of ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’ at Raven Row in London – the first comprehensive UK survey of Hujar’s photographs to date. – Alastair Curtis

Alastair Curtis You arrived in New York from Cape Town in 1976. When was the first time Hujar saw your work?

Gary Schneider He came to a performance I did at Artists Space in 1977, where I also had photographs on the wall. I wasn’t a photographer, I was a filmmaker and did performances, but he could see that I knew how to print. Though we had met earlier, through my partner John Erdman, that was the first time he saw my work and, after that, we became closer. At the time, I was poor. I was in grad school and needed money, so, he got me a job in a photo lab, and I discovered that being in a darkroom was a very focused activity which I could do well. I thought I should start my own photo lab [with Erdman], and Peter loved the idea.

AC Was this lab in your apartment?

GS Yes, we originally opened it in our apartment in 1981, but eventually it got too big, so we moved into a loft around the corner. We had some commercial clients to pay the bills, but I limited myself to printing artists’ exhibition prints.

AC This is when you began printing for many artists, including Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Lisette Model and David Wojnarowicz. What was it like working with them?

GS Very slow. Conceptualizing what an artist needs is a very slow process for me. I have to understand the work well to begin with. I couldn’t produce prints for anyone that really didn’t know their own work. I have my own practice, so I can’t impose my ideas on other artists. I wouldn’t do it. With Peter, it’s very complicated because he was such an extraordinary printer of his own work.

AC What made him such a great printer?

GS He experimented with the way in which the viewer reads the narrative of the image. There’s no definitive print, per se, for any of his images, all the prints function, and they’re all interesting to me. Now, when I’m printing an image posthumously, since I don’t have him here to proof with me, I have to come up with a way to make a version of all of his prints or a particular one. My goal is that Peter would accept my print as one of his own.

AC How did your collaboration grow?

GS He mentored me for the ten years I knew him in darkroom technique and constructing narrative. After he was diagnosed with HIV, in early 1987, he didn’t go back into the darkroom. So, I printed his work for him. When he wanted to give a print to his doctors, he had me produce an edition of ten Will: Shar-Pei [1985]. He had never printed an edition before, so this process was very painful for him. It freaked him out. After I made the prints and handed them to him, he dropped them all, fortunately they weren’t damaged. It was too much for him to see an edition of one image where all the prints were almost matching. This was against his darkroom religion. I wouldn’t call it a collaboration since he directed all the proofing. And, to this day, I always follow his dictum, with his work and mine, that no two prints need to match: they all need to function, I print one at a time. Later, in instructions to Stephen Koch, who is executor of Peter’s estate, he named me as his printer.

AC In your book Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom, you write about the eccentricities of a Hujar print. For those uninitiated in darkroom technique, could you describe the processes behind a Hujar photograph?

GS He made great negatives, which could have been printed in many ways. There is a lot more information than is needed in his negatives, so each image has its own kind of DNA, which is unusual for a photographer. He didn’t really have a method that was the same every time: whether behind the camera or afterwards in the darkroom, it was always shifting. So, whenever I’m printing one of his images, I have to re-imagine how he discovered its meaning in post-production.

AC You write about how each photograph tells a story. You must have seen similar narratives recur across his photographs.

GS The portrait in all of its iterations; people and animals, dead and dying; backstage, landscape, streetscape – I could go on. In our lab, we had a long wall where we hung examples to show the range of work we printed. Peter would come to visit very often, and he’d look at something new and say, ‘I can do a better version.’ And then he would make his version. So, one day, he looked at a photograph of the Meadowlands in New Jersey [an ecological and industrial wasteland], then drove out with David [Wojnarowicz], who would schlep him out of the city often, and he came back with his own wasteland photo, which was very different from the one he had seen. Peter had a singular vision, the extent of which we are only beginning to grasp.

AC Gary Schneider in Contortion (II) [1979] has always been one of my favourite Hujar photographs. You were photographed by him many times, and you’re one of only a few subjects who can say you’ve been on both sides of his camera. How did the process of being photographed by him assist your work in the darkroom?

GS I was young, and I was in awe of him. I thought he was a truly brilliant artist. In the studio session, you can see that, at first, I was trying to make ‘Peter Hujar’ images for him. He didn’t direct. He just waited. He allowed you to come to him. It was your job, as the performer, to trust him fully – to trust that he knew what he was doing and to allow it to happen, rather than to try to make it happen. But that experience didn’t really change how I was in the darkroom – or now, digitally – except that I proof the image until the intention of the artist’s work reveals itself to me. And that is related to how Peter photographed.

AC How did your relationship with Hujar influence your co-curation of the new show ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’ at Raven Row?

GS In his lifetime, Peter and I would discuss what made an image and a print successful. There are certain exchanges that remain with me – not always the words, but the dynamic. So, I could bring that to my collaboration with John Douglas Millar at Raven Row.

AC Your collaboration with Hujar is really moving. It feels like an ongoing process, even though he is no longer with us. You’re an amazing artist in your own right, too. How has working so closely with him influenced your own practice?

GS Peter’s work really feeds me. There is an empathic relationship with the person he is photographing and, even though our art looks nothing alike, that’s my process as well. I use duration – eight-minute to one-hour exposures – as a method to allow the person I’m photographing to participate with me and to reveal as much of themselves as they can. I give them the opportunity to become transparent in their performance, and I think that very much comes from Peter. I began making portraits in this way the year after Peter died.

Peter Hujar's ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’ at Raven Row, London, until 6 April

^{Main image: Peter Hujar, Stephen Varble (III), Soho, New York (detail), 1976. Courtesy: © 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}