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| PETER HUJAR: PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE SEVENTIES (THE OUTSIDERS) |
| MARIETTA NEUSS LONDON: 131 Curtain Rd, London, EC2A, United Kingdom |
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| Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987 leaving a large, complex and profound body of work. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians,
writers and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. Having already established a
reputation for himself through the powerful photographs he had been making since the late 1950s, Hujar was enormously admired for his completely
uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician and his portraits of people and animals, nudes, and landscapes, with their exquisite black and white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always
beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. Although his extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was his last and his reputation while he was alive remained that of an artist’s artist. |
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