"well, I can't interrupt God"
Peter Hujar's Day by Linda Rosenkrantz is 5.25 x 8 x 0.25 inches & a lush 36 (!) pages.
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In different formats, the photographer Peter Hujar and the writer-conversationalist Linda Rosenkrantz produce quite similar art. Their work is direct, magic, close, instinctive. They’re interested in character over anything else. They both work in black-and-white, which is more typical for the printed word but we cannot just exclude a similarity just because it’s obvious. Above all, their project is a devotional to their friends.
As in Talk (my very beloved-top-favorite-best-friend book), Linda Rosenkrantz follows the transcription format for Peter Hujar’s Day. In Talk, Rosenkrantz records her friends’ conversations over a summer. In Peter Hujar’s Day, Rosenkrantz asks Hujar to recount everything he did the day before: December 18th 1974. The day had been arbitrarily selected and Hujar was meant to write down, but he forgot.
At first, Hujar is like, oh my day was boring— but then he remembers it. It’s packed with a bursting roster of 1974 cameos (Lauren Hutton, Susan Sontag). He’s runs all Manhattan in different coats and fibs to various people. When he visits Allen Ginsberg to take his photo for the New York Times, Ginsberg’s meditating ostentatiously while his vassals address Christmas cards. It’s, as we say, a scene.
Of course, this slim document feels extremely precious on its face: a snapshot of the person behind the camera, an intimate and ordinary and special diary of how they lived their lives. But my favorite thing about it is the friendship, the evident & adoring charge between Linda and Peter.
I just kept thinking how much I want to do this project with my friends, though they don’t have to go to Allen Ginsberg’s creepy 10th street apartment and then buy persimmons with him, though I don’t know, they really might be doing a 2023 equivalent, I don’t ask them every day about every single little thing they did the day before. Now, I really think that I must !
I couldn’t resist, here’s Peter Hujar’s portrait of Purse Book author, Cookie Mueller: