A lecture and conversation with Getty Museum assistant curator Arpad Kovacs offering a closer look into the extensive photographic career of Peter Hujar.
Lecture Description: Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) made tender and intimate black-and-white photographs that often pulled viewers in unfamiliar directions. His technical skills were honed in the studios of commercial photographers and his subjects included friends and acquaintances, along with an assorted set of cultural luminaries and outcasts of New York City’s bohemian Lower East Side.
He also turned the lens of his camera on the built environment with the same familiarity and self-assurance as more well-known predecessors, including Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans. Hujar captured New York as a formidable metropolis, and a place that was also gripped by decay and on the brink of financial ruin.
On the occasion of the first solo exhibition of Peter Hujar’s work in Los Angeles, organized by Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills, this presentation will offer an overview of this important photographer’s career.
Arpad Kovacs is an assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. His exhibitions have focused on twentieth-century and contemporary photography, with a specific interest in conceptual practices and time-based media. A graduate of Queen's University and York University, Arpad arrived at the Getty Museum in 2011. He organized the monographic exhibitions Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense (2014); Werner Herzog: Hearsay of the Soul (2014); Richard Learoyd: In the Studio (2016); as well as a number of thematic shows.
Images (2): 1. Divine, 1975. 2. Gary Schneider in Contortion, 1979. © The Peter Hujar Archive LLC