David Wojnarowicz

Peter Hujar, 1981 · Gallery 202 · Floor 2

So, look at the cigarette. It's in his mouth. Two fingers up, holding it there. It's lit. One eye catches the light. The other almost disappears. That's David Wojnarowicz. Peter Hujar took the photograph. Peter was twenty years older. He'd been taking pictures of everybody in the downtown scene for years, ya know, artists, writers, drag performers. Andy Warhol filmed him four times. Called him the boy that never blinked. That's how he worked, too. He'd sit you down and wait. Wait for the face you put on for people to slip. Then he took the picture. His friend Stephen Koch said your portrait was always unmistakably you. But only because it was also unmistakably his. Anyway, Peter and David met at a gay bar in the East Village. They were lovers for a little while. Then that ended, and they stayed close. Peter told him he ought to paint. David had never painted before. So he did. Years later, David said, "Everything I made, I made for Peter." Six years after this picture, Peter's in the hospital with AIDS. David's there a lot. When Peter dies, David asks everyone else to leave the room. He has a camera with him. He photographs Peter's face. His hands. His feet. Peter took this one. David took those. At the funeral, Fran Lebowitz said Peter had hung up on every important photography dealer in the Western world. He said once, "When people talk about me, I want them to be whispering." Outside downtown, while he was alive, his pictures mostly went unnoticed. The younger artists noticed. Nan Goldin. And this guy. Everybody else took a while. David turned into one of the loudest artists of the AIDS years. Five years after Peter, he died of AIDS too. And this photograph? David gave it to the museum.

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