The sense of the person behind the camera in a photograph is perhaps more palpable and mysterious than artists who work in other media. Through a photo, we can feel like we are more directly privy to an artist’s perspective. Think about Diane Arbus and the complicated oft-psychologized conflation of her personal life and choice of images — there’s more than one salacious biography, along with a peculiar film, Fur, with Nicole Kidman in the role of the artist during her formative years. Then there is the more complicated case of the deceased artist who was not well recognized in his or her lifetime — consider SFMOMA’s 2011 Francesca Woodman exhibition, which told a story as informed by the artist’s tragic suicide as the numerous self-portraits on view. A mythology emerges from the idea that we are seeing the same perspective of the artist’s self, alone in her studio. In actuality, these narratives are fascinating fictions regarding the role of the photographer’s relationship to the self and others.
How we imagine these artists in some ways is akin to a photograph they take of us. How fitting it is that photographer Nan Goldin called her 1996 mid-career survey I’ll Be Your Mirror, after a Velvet Underground song. Goldin, a widely known photographer whose most classic pictures chronicle a community lost to AIDS and addiction, and frequently involve self-portraiture, is the subject of one of a pair of exhibitions currently at Fraenkel Gallery. The other show, titled Love & Lust, is a collection of photographs by Peter Hujar. While not exactly unknown, his career was erratic and cut short by an untimely death in 1987 due to complications from AIDS, one of many artists whose lives were lost to this health crisis. He was an important figure in the New York art scene in the 1970s and ’80s, yet not so widely exhibited. You might know his iconic photograph Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1974 or be aware that he was the lover and mentor of artist and writer David Wojnarowicz — these details, at least, have floated into a compact Wikipedia entry.

Many more details surfaced in an intimate gallery conversation between Goldin and New Yorker photography critic Vince Aletti, who was close friends with Hujar. Moderated by Fraenkel, Goldin and Aletti told tales of Hujar, whose nude self-portrait in a gay bathhouse cubicle hung in the next room. That seemingly fully revealing image was enhanced by recollections of his surviving friends: Hujar was handsome, difficult and magnetic, and an aesthetically sensitive artist more gifted than schooled. But what was most striking about the conversation was the way a more fleshed-out image of the man emerged like an exposed photo in a tray of developer.
Fraenkel introduced Goldin, whose now-classic photographs of her circle of friends generated a cinematic aura around their very real lives, as an artist who has had enormous influence on other artists. “Something you can’t fake,” Fraenkel said. She in turn described how Hujar was a formative influence, particularly for his uncompromising commitment to his work. “Which is why he had such a small career,” she said wryly. As a contrast, Fraenkel invoked what he called “the M-Word,” Robert Mapplethorpe, a much more successful contemporary of Hujar’s. There are definite parallels; they both mined aspects of gay culture to different degrees of popular success. “You’d never see one of Peter’s pictures on a T-shirt,” Goldin countered, generating laughter from the invitation-only audience of collectors and photo professionals.

For Aletti, thoughtful in a manner befitting his profession, Hujar provided lessons in seeing. “He got me to understand the difficulty of photography, the struggle that goes into making a good picture,” he said. He also recalled that everyone who knew Hujar seemed to fall in love with him, at least initially. Both Goldin and Aletti noted that at the funeral everyone seemed to feel like they were Hujar’s best friend, yet none of them had met each other before.