Peter Hujar: Rialto: Exhibition opens at the Ukrainian Museum in New York

“Peter Hujar lived in a Ukrainian neighborhood in New York, but few Ukrainian Americans knew him or his work,” says Peter Doroshenko, director of the Ukrainian Museum in New York, which is currently hosting an exhibition on the first 15 years of the artist's career. “As we focus on his early work, it was important to show Hujar's three important photo series, as he used these groups of images as the basis for his later portraits and other diverse work. There have been important exhibitions on Peter Hujar over the past thirty years, but never has the focus been on his formative years.”

Three work complexes from the 1950s and 1960s are the focus Peter Hujar: Rialtowith many previously unpublished photographs from Southbury (1957), Florence (1958) and the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo (1963). Also on display are Hujar's black and white portraits of the personalities who frequented the bohemian district of downtown New York, including Iggy Pop and Janis Joplin.

Born into an immigrant family in New York, Hujar was raised by his Ukrainian grandmother, who spoke only Ukrainian to him for the first five years of his life. Later issues with his unstable upbringing led him to seek refuge in photography, which he combined with his immersion in the New York subcultures in which he felt most comfortable.

“I believe that Hujar's formal Ukrainian upbringing during his lifetime created various systems and controls for his photographic work,” adds Doroshenko. “Ukrainians are very critical and strict with themselves. Hujar had the same critical DNA in his handling of the camera and later in the darkroom. Peter Hujar lived and worked in one of New York's most active and creative epicenters, and yet he was ahead of his time in many ways.”