Naming What Matters: Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, and Power of the Particular
/Earlier this year I wrote in The Red Hook Star‑Revue about Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death, the only book published during the photographer’s lifetime. His subjects are frequently people he was on intimate terms with: artists, friends, lovers. Yet they’re not just types—they’re individuals.
Goldin’s line about “animals with a name” could just as easily describe Hujar’s photographs of people. You’re not just seeing the person, but Hujar’s relationship with them. It comes across in the body language and the look in their eyes—or, in the case of the dead, the place where those eyes once were.
You see this intimacy in Goldin’s work, too. In The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin didn’t stage her images or use elaborate lighting. We see a lot of messy apartments. If the bar was dark, the photo is too. We see Goldin and her friends dancing, playing Monopoly, wiping their eyes during phone calls. We see them hugging, crying, having sex, doing drugs.
These images have become iconic of a particular time and place (1980’s downtown New York). Their power comes from their specificity. This wasn’t an outsider looking in. It was a periscope popping up from the inside.
As queer artists, Hujar and Goldin shared a refusal to conform. They showed who and what mattered to them. By sharing their work with us, they invite us to name what matters to us, too.
“His photographs of animals are some of my favourite pictures. They’re of specific animals, not a species; animals with a name.”
