Edition : First / Gottingen / Steidl / 2016 / Hardcover. / Near Fine / Near Fine 4to. 40pp. White boards in dustwrapper. Numerous Black & White plates. Text in English.
“It’s a vanished world, and Peter Hujar was right there in it. The Lower East Side between 1972 and 1985 ― filled with artists, wannabe artists and hangers-on ― was a community of the misbegotten gathered from every town in America and relocated in the mean streets between Broadway and the Bowery. Nothing but their talent, their flamboyance, their rank gender-bending mockery and their arch irony supported them. Some made their names. Many came to grief. A few made art. In those days, the gutted streets of the Lower East Side looked like a war zone. Everyone lived and worked on the extreme outer margins of money and art, penniless and unknown. As a community, Downtown was a counterstatement to the rich New York of the banks, museums, media, corporations … and the art world itself. That Downtown is forever gone. Time, gentrification, disease and death have taken their toll and turned this vibrant epoch into a chapter of art history. But before it vanished, its extravagant cast sat for Peter Hujar’s camera ― and is now alive again in front of our eyes. Featured among others: Joe Brainard, William Burroughs, Remy Charlip, Edwin Denby, Divine, Ray Johnson, Fran Lebowitz, Charles Ludlum, Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, John Waters, Robert Wilson, David Wojnarowicz.”
