 I'm the director of the coffee house. Thank you all for coming here today. Thank you for coming to coffee house number 163. I know it's a little bit of a stretch for us because it's not directly related to theater, but Peter was part of the community and he took pictures of everybody downtown. So I think it's time to extend it. And if we talk about community, we just lost three days ago a very special person. We lost Barbara, Maya Buston. She was here two weeks ago. She was attacked nine days ago in front of her house. And Barbara killed him. And she passed away on the four days ago. The last coffee house we had before the pandemic hit was Barbara. Barbara was a special person, a unique person. I can't even imagine a life without her. And it's very important that we dedicate and remember today. Actually, we're gonna stream her coffee house soon. The woman who attacked her is still on the loose and her picture is being shown every half an hour. Number one. So if you know anything, please. As you can see, coffee house is happening each time on a set of a different show. This is a set of the show that's called Lemon Girls by Token Bank, which is highly, highly recommended. And if you come today, there's a $10 discount if you say Saturday 10. Anyway, it runs till March 27. And I really really recommend it. Anyway, we can start now. Thank you. Hi. Oh, if I do this, I can see people. It's gonna be wonderful to see you all here. I might take my hand out. I won't see you anymore. But anyway, my name is Stephen Koch. And I am the director of the archive of Peter Hujan and have been for the last 35 years. And I'm particularly grateful to have a thrilling audience like this to talk to tonight because it's a very live wire. I want to leave special time, extra time for the Q and A. And I'd like to begin before I introduce our panel with a slight confession. It's followed by a little bit of a story. And then I have to leave. Please use the mic. Oh, sorry, yes, no good. Okay, now. Is this worth anything? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'm not gonna repeat all that stuff. So a few years before he died, Peter and I were together as we were many, many times. And he was talking to me and he had mentioned Lisette Modell. And I said to him, boom, is Lisette Modell? And he looked at me with blank shock. Obviously, considering whether the friendship was gonna last for the next five minutes. And then he said, Lisette Modell is a photographer. And Lisette Modell is one of the greats. That phrase stuck in my mind, one of the greats. And I said, I don't know anything about it. He said, oh, yes, you do. And he then started naming Modell's pictures which were already inscribed in my imagination without her name being there. And I learned something about photography that day. But I also learned something about the word, great. When I got my job as the director of Peter's archive, I think it's possible that nobody on Peter's Rolodex. Remember Rolodexes? Nobody on Peter's Rolodex knew less about the fine artist of photography than me. Certainly, much less than anybody on this family. And people were a little missed about that. I knew certain things for sure. I knew that he was an important photographer. I knew that his work was significant. I knew that I had a big responsibility. I knew that it was gonna need to be taken from relative obscurity into visibility. And I knew he was one of the, if not the most interesting person I'd ever known. I was limited in my understanding of his work. That's what the convection is. I didn't really get it. I thought, for example, Peter is a difficult photographer. It's hard for people to understand him. It takes work to get past the kind of screen in front of the work that's difficult to penetrate. That didn't matter. I knew that it was important work and I did my best by several years into what I was doing as things were beginning to take a little bit of movement toward Peter coming out of obscurity. And it was every day working on this. A curator, Joel Smith, now the Curated Photography at the Marvin Library was then the Curated Photography at the Princeton University Library, a museum, excuse me. And he said to me one day, would you like to see our collection of fugers? And I didn't even know that there was a Princeton collection of fugers, but there were plenty of them. And he said, come out, I'll set him up on a small show or three. And I was delighted, got on the train and took the dainty, came over to the museum and was greeted by Joel who led me to a room that was maybe 20 by 20, something like that, all white with racks. And he had set up 20 of those pictures with the curator's incredible intelligence. He's a very smart guy. And I walked in and I was speechless. I thought, what have I gotten into? What is going on here? I was absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of that room and the extraordinary work that was laid out there. I finally, after years of involvement with Peter's work, got wet splitter in the face. It was so, I guess it is one of the most important artistic experiences of my entire life. And I will never get past it and I will always be grateful that it happened. And I know it took a while to get there. But nonetheless, one of the greats, as I was trying to promote Peter's work, I was always very careful. Don't talk about him as a great photographer. Don't say great people should think that you're bullshitting them. Stop, just hold back a little bit. Don't overdo it. Then, with the Mormon Library show, three of the principal critics of photography in this country referred to him as a great photographer. I therefore have to say, Peter, you are just one of the greats. Oh, wait, I think that we're going to begin. Let me introduce the panel first and then we have a short film clip of Ethel Eichelberger talking about Peter. But first, Mojave, a photographer whose book, The Shabbiness of Beauty, right here, is a collaboration of her aesthetic and her personality with Peter's work and a very remarkable piece of work that it is. Next, Ma'am Golden. Some of you may be able to do no, she doesn't know who she is. She's now known the fact that she's probably one of the most eminent and impressive and important photographers now working anywhere. And she is of dear friends, Peter's. Gary Schneider, right Gary is a photographer who is as radical and original as anybody I can think of. And at the same time, he is one of the most impressive and important critters of photography anywhere in the world right now. And I make the fortune he was guided into his matier by Peter himself in a major relationship. If any of you are interested in getting a really intimate understanding of Peter and his work and how he went about it, just go to Magic Hour Photography interview with Gary Schneider, which is there right now. And one of the very special interviews I've ever heard. It's very good. Next, Vinciletti. There were about 20 people who believe that Peter was their best friend. To one, it was... I thought, well, he's my best friend. I mean, that's all there is to it. I did, best friend, it's obvious. Then I realized I was standing at the end of a very long line. But at the end of the line was the real best friend, which is Vinciletti. Now, the photography critic out of the New Yorker magazine. So should we take a look at this clip of... as long as you look at it? Is that affordable right now? He's a gallery crew member. Thank you very much for having me. And I'm just going to give you some examples. Here's the picture of that flyer, the beautiful flyer that's a Peter Feudal photograph. Peter's one of my best friends. He's like a foodie. He got the dollar long before he skipped his birthday on January 23. He's like, he's always showing me the way you live. In New York, everybody eats their meal. You know, we go to a restaurant, stay in the Lennox, which I'll be going down to the Jerry Atkins section. It's very easy. What? Purity festival. Purity festival, yeah. And if you're a jello, if you're a girl. If you're a guy, you got to eat peanut butter and jelly if you're a jello. But they didn't always call us before they asked us. But Peter always showed me how to eat and feel good because he always, and I would just still have to support myself so that I could go to like places like ATC in New York and there's a bunch of fun in New York. But Peter had to get to school because he always said, do you really want something? And this is my vlog, getting to, do you really want something? And do you want to pair with us? I still look like this. When you visualize it in your mind, it's going to be shy. I fought for a long time about how to begin a discussion and I thought we could start with how it was your first meet or encounter of Peter who was working. I thought that really does take price for the most animal possible way of filming about anything. Therefore, what I'm going to do is ask the members of the panel, as I pass the mic down, if I could just talk about the impact of Peter and his work on their life and their work. Can we start with more? Sure. Well, I'm the late comer on this panel because I only discovered Peter who did his work when I moved to New York in 1988. And it was through his book Portraits in Life and Death, which my partner was finding multiple copies of, believe it or not, in all the used bookstores of New York. He was a great collector. And that's what that was. I think the first time I saw his work, then there was, I literally remember the show that Nan curated, Witnesses Against a Mountain Show at Artist Space. He was still a great little booklet. I think you can still borrow from that show. There was a show at the Great Art Gallery right around that time. But it was the book that really struck me. And just the whole structure of the book, the portraits of people lying down or reclining, and then the second part, maybe 10 prints from the Catacombs in Palermo. And actually, you know, just to sort of directly answer your question about one of the ways that his work impacted him. In 2008, I was editing a video. I had a grant in a studio in Paris for 10 months. I was shooting video in all the different paris cemeteries, the big ones, the little ones. I was going to the Catacombs. I had this text. I had a grant to make a video, and I was trying to make a video from this text that I'd written and chaining myself to my keyboard day in and day out, nothing was happening. And then, one day, kind of just like, day's ex machina, I remember Rujara's book, Portraits in Life and Death, and it gave me the idea for how to structure this video to have it be in two parts. The first were portraits of people commenting on a passage, a letter that Walter Benjamin wrote, and then the second part were all these portraits of the cemeteries. I can say more, but maybe I'll pass. I was one of the people who thought Peter was my best friend. And, yeah, I was in love with him. I think most people in the audience down in New York know this Peter. He was so charming and so beautiful and so seductive. We used to call him the human valiant. And his work had an enormous impact on me, but it took time because my work was from the act of living, and his work is so deep and so still, and he stills time, but he shows the depths. And after I really started to understand his work, I wanted to be him. And so there was a period, and he was a big fan of my early black and white work from Boston in the 70s. And so at one point we tried to do each other's work, and it failed miserably. I don't have that kind of aesthetic and stillness and ability to frame. He taught me to love photography. I thought photography was a lesser art, and I was always on my way to be a filmmaker. I was just passing through photography. And maybe someday, possibly someday, he taught me to love the medium. He taught me to respect it. He was the greatest portraitist of the 20th century. In line with Julia Margaret Cameron, I think. I think he's the director, son of her, of the set. But he took, I don't think anyone else could look as deeply as Peter could look at people. And he showed all the different stages of life from babies to death. And he wasn't really afraid of death in his work. I'll let him pass. I have more, but we can get back. I was also one of Peter's best friends. Dr. T was my best friend. Absolutely. He totally changed my life. I met him in 77, and he saw that I could see photography. He got me a job in a photo lab, and he saw that I could also print. And then he made me open a lab. He architected that lab. He tried to turn it into a big lab, but me and my partner, I met him through John, who's known him 10 years earlier. We failed miserably. I mean, we printed a lot of people, and that collection is very nice, and it's at Harvard right now, as an archive. But we were terrible business people. I'm busy watching the Warhol documentary right now. He was like, you know, I was a business artist, and I thought, oh my God, what did he even think of Warhol? He's like, you know, what does that mean? But it's true. He, as a portrait artist, I'm also a main portrait. The stillness, as Man said, in those portraits is unlike anybody else. It's extraordinary. But the way he influenced me, and there's a book, the Linda Rosenpranz book, that just got published with Jordan, there's a little passage in it where he's photographing Helen Ginsberg, and he describes why the portrait doesn't work. And he said, well, Helen Ginsberg never came to me. He never let go of himself to, I'm not quoting him now, I'm kind of paraphrasing my own how I see things. And when I make portraits, it's a real trial because I look at the result, and I judge them in the same way. Did that person give themselves to me? And of course I again, it affects my relationship with him from that point on. And it did with Helen Ginsberg and Peter. In fact, he's told me to Linda, and he says, well, you know, this thing was told in the New York Times, maybe I can make it better. And that's the other way he really influenced me. He really believed that once you've made the photograph, you could then improve it in the dark room or make it work in the dark room. And that's what he told me. He told me the dark room. In fact, he sent me to Lizette Madel and to be mentioning her to learn it in the same way he did and he wanted me to learn from her so that then he could crib. He could actually, while I was looking at his prints, I could tell him how she printed and how she was able to make the negative function as a narrative, as a, you know, like pushing and pulling and very dodging, reaching, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, he's changed. He probably changed my life, you know, in many ways. Thank you. I would never claim to be Peter's best friend. Because I knew there were so many others out there. But he certainly, he did also change my life in a lot of ways. When I met him, I was writing about music. So, I was interested in photography, I was interested in everything. But he taught me to look at things in a way that I hadn't before, just by looking at things with him. Looking at his work, paging through magazines with him, sitting and looking at Harper's Bazaar, looking at every book. Because I was buying things when I couldn't afford to and Peter just knew he couldn't. So, if he would come to my house, we would look at things. And looking, noticing what he noticed made a huge impression on me. I saw what he picked out, what he stopped at, what he didn't find interesting. And it really taught me to discern in a way that was my own, but that I understood, you know, something that he made me understand that you could look in a really educational and useful way. But also, I was thinking about when I met him, who was early in my time in New York, and he also changed the way I thought gay men could be. When I was in college, my two gay mentors were both super campy. And I could never relate to that. That wasn't me. I didn't really understand that. And so, to spend time with Peter, who was like super masculine and big and tough in a lot of ways, and could get through pretty much anything, and was also gayer than anybody I knew, and actively gayer than anyone I knew in my life, it was... I realized that that was a way to be. That was a possible way to be, that I hadn't even kind of grasped before. And that was not that I could be Peter in any reasonable way, but at least I could come closer to something that I could understand as another way to live. Well, you already have your own mic. Oh, I have my own mic. This works? Okay. I just want to add one or two remarks. First of all, about Schneider and Urban Gallery, miserable failure is not the word I would use. It did, while it existed, some of the most interesting and important photography, plenty of photography that was done earlier in the country. The major photographers in this country, in the city, lined up to have a chance to have him print their work. Yeah, they did. It's absolutely true. And something that Vincent just said makes me want to make a comment, because I think it's important to say, when he was ill, I would come regularly, I have a notebook, and I would write down what he was telling me I was supposed to do, when it happened. And one of the things he said to me about probably 500 times was, remember, I want to be remembered as a photographer who was gay, not as a gay photographer. Yeah. And I listened to that, and I thought, okay, I guess I get it. He wants to be remembered as Peter, who are not George Platt lines. Okay. I'll bear that in mind. But in 35 years since Peter died, the world has changed in ways that he could probably not imagine. And I find it thrilling, not definitive of his whole work, but a thrilling factor in his work, that he is part of a cutting edge in a change in the world's attitudes toward gayness and gay art, produced by gays, that he could not even imagine was possible in 1987. But it's been wonderful to watch it happen. And that's my comment for the moment. You have more questions? No. What else would you like to say? Besides the influence on my work, and also I was thinking, you know, in this day and age, when people scroll through an Instagram, they don't know how to look anymore. People don't, people see in one half a second, literally. And there's just this constant digestion of imagery, superficial imagery. And I think it's so important to sit and look at Peter's work to understand what it's like because his work is out there now. People's, it's available. It's not so abstract. But also he taught me how to be in the world. He taught me never to compromise. And it was a really important lesson. He taught me that the hardest word for an artist to say was no, and that you had to learn that. The first shooting commercially I did was for Mademoiselle in the early 80s. And I never, I was very nervous. So I bought all the Mademoiselles and tried to study how to be a Mademoiselle photographer. And it didn't work. I set up this table at Evelyn's. You remember Evelyn? And I asked Peter to borrow his tripod so he came and delivered it to Evelyn. He saw the set up I'd done. He said, you are an ankle and he smashed the whole table. And he taught me never to compromise on anything. We were supposed to have a show at Jake Orney Gallery and together and for some reason I was even more difficult than Peter. Everyone said Peter was so difficult but you know, move over. Jake Orney dropped me while we were playing the show. I said Peter, Peter dropped it. He refused to do the show. He had this deep loyalty and I would like always to be like Peter in that way. I think Peter would be really distressed by the world now. I can keep him like I am. And my whole generation has gone to get home to us. The best people die. He was already distressed in his own time. It's surprising to think out how exponentially it could have grown in the years since. Yeah, but if more of us had been alive maybe things would have gone differently. We lost the whole generation. And a whole audience. Not only of artists but of audiences. And the real estate of the artists. I need to address something you said about the lab. I was very proud of my work and actually I mentioned different artists. We exhibited the printers first in the lab. To show the range. I was always printing their work rather than being the author of any part of it. And the great thing that Peter taught me was how to re-address this thing of who the artist is. What their idea was inside of the photograph and then to wrestle with the narrative in order to bring that idea to them. And so it was always a performance. It was always a performance on my part. And I think he sent me to Lizette also because she printed in the same way he did and when I was looking through prints with him because we always did that we looked through the whole range of prints he kind of wanted me to be that other voice and I use John for this now with my own work and when I'm printing Peter's work to say between these two prints what is happening why did you push that figure back more and bring this one forward and why did you make that area more black and make this one more gray and more muddy in order to so he always wanted me to talk about those aspects of the work of his printing and I grew up looking through I was at the archive last two weeks ago looking through all the prints and it really brought back that experience of going through his prints with him when he was putting together the Gracie show or when I was there to select the prints I did processing for him and then I'd come in and he'd give me prints so does that make that clearer? I'm very proud of the work that I did at the lab and I really did get an idea of what they are and he cared so much about printing he really cared a lot about printing and he did, he actually did he really loved that early body of work of yours and he said to me, someday a man might come to you to print that work and you should absolutely encourage him and we did actually yeah, he did actually before it was much later, it was serious later and then I used all the paper that I inherited from Louise Del Wolf to print your show where she died and her system left me all the poetry all that beautiful Oh God, that was Peter's paper as well and he had me print for him in the last year of his life and so I think he was kind of training me all the way along it was only really ten years of training but to be able to do that I want to talk about being photographed by Peter I never had the opportunity we talked about it many times and it's one of my great regrets but I was living with Greer Blankton when she was photographed and I was close to cooking noodles when she was photographed and Greer was really nervous and she went and spent a few hours and she came back totally intoxicated he had completely seduced her and he brought her to this point of total relaxation and comfort in her body that was extraordinary and cookie the same she had an incredible experience with Peter so I think that shows in the work how empathetic and deeply connected he was to a subject my theory now is that we're all in solitude confinement in our heads and I think Peter felt that very much and I think Peter was able to open the bars of other people's cages the inside prisons for a minute at least and because there's nobody who connected as deeply as his people in a silent way and I think people need to really look at anybody that hasn't looked at his work I'd like to talk toward that too because Peter did photograph me once for Courtesy and Life and Death which I'm really glad exists at my knee at that point but I don't remember the occasion at all I don't remember the experience I have the worst memory in the world and this is one of the things I'm sorry I never went back and took notes on immediately because I've been asked about it so many times but what I think about is at one point I asked him to photograph a boyfriend of mine many who I was really kind of obsessed with but he was really kind of withdrawn quiet guy and didn't communicate easily he'd met Peter casually with me at some point and he wanted to be a boxer at that moment in his life and so I asked Peter to photograph him and I really wondered always what that experience was like for both of them because Peter produced I think five prints from that session and they all were so open I mean here was many who I always felt was like super close and kind of difficult and he clearly, they related on some level I suspect on some level of both being damaged in a similar way but they didn't need to talk about but that they saw in each other and the pictures were really extraordinary and he also wondered like how did he get Manny naked he didn't care that quickly but I think it started because Manny decided he was going to be in his boxing shorts so he was already close and Manny again somebody who generally seemed like super close down looked so relaxed and it had to do with that relationship with Peter being open to him and vice versa so that was kind of revelatory to me I didn't feel like Peter got anything of that with me but that's okay I wasn't expecting that the odd thing was I recently got to see the contact sheets of a lot of other shoots that Peter did with me some just on the street but I had forgotten but he also photographed me before this portraits in life and death in my old apartment and I saw like five contact sheets of that material and I immediately understood why I never saw them again why he never used anything from them they were really not interesting and he knew that and I never saw the results so it wasn't until seeing it now that I got what didn't work that time who knows why I just want to add once there's a lot of things I would like to add but I'm not going to do that I'm going to say one thing about this business of everybody being his best friend he had a capacity for intimacy which was unique in my experience it's not just that you could go and tell him all your troubles and go on and on and talking about your sex status and how things were going no, you could talk about anything and he would hear you better than anybody heard you and it was a wonderful experience it was very much one on one the Peter the great listener turned into Peter the charmer or the great but also the charmer there were a couple of other people around and that was very interesting but that one-on-one experience with him in conversation as with when he was photographing was a very profound and valuable one and I will never get over not being able to have it anymore I would say another thing Peter knew, quote, everybody he knew he was acquainted with everybody he connected to unbelievable numbers of people and yet he was in some essential way that I don't mean to get sentimental about a very isolated person a very... on his own and I'll give you one example of this as an anecdote that may help he went to one of the advanced high schools I don't always get the name long but it was not music in art but it was one for very gifted people who were going to work in fields other than high art of one sort and photography was considered one of them comic book making was there Tony Bennett was a graduate of it and Calvin Klein was a graduate of this high school and so was Peter he was there given an enormous direction and helped by his English teacher a remarkable woman named Daisy Alden who helped, thank you I'm glad to hear that she was a very special force but this is what happened when he graduated from high school they were all on the platform in their caps and downs with the little castles and all the stuff and the stack of diplomas were being handed out and the names would be called the kid would come up, get the diploma and his family would have flawed and everyone else would sort of applaud too and then they called Peter Hinchard and he wasn't there no one came up and then they called him again and from the very back row of the auditorium one person started to climb slowly, which was Peter himself now I don't know what that image means but if you need something it really does well I think that's incredibly precocious for high school graduation performance it's one of the best stories I've ever heard in my graduation but I was just going to say something that you said before that made me think about not having known Peter I never met him but I read a lot about him and I always had this impression that he was a very feral person and that also that he kind of lived on the edge of poverty but then, so actually in preparation for today I re-read the Peter Hinchard's day book that was just published by Magic Hour and it was actually really struck this time by, like he said, just how many people this guy knew how many names he mentions and what he knows about all these people and also just like the kind of almost a novelistic sensibility that he has in his storytelling, in his recounting of one day it's really quite, you know, phenomenal he's really like a 19th century novelist in terms of all the details that he remembers and he recounts and maybe he's embellishing but it doesn't even sound like he's doing that you know, he has a character appear at one scene and then reappear a little later and another scene, like all these kind of devices of storytelling are just there in his casual without notes apparently recounting of his day but also, you know, one of the things that struck me about that book too were the pictures of his apartment which I don't remember ever looking like that unbelievably glamorous yeah, like two pianos and those sort of, you know, so chairs it looks so fancy I mean beyond, even if all those things didn't last in his apartment for very long that was a great loft in a great space beautiful windows I mean, if he was living in poverty he was living really well so, you know, it's like leaking land at least in a really terrific place he built his own dark room if he needed nothing else, it was there and nothing was expensive at that moment even though none of us had a lot of money I would Peter was certainly the poorest very serious grown-up I've ever been close to him and I knew it and at the same time it was impossible to think of him as poor he didn't seem poor at all many people I discovered used the word to describe him as an aristocratic and it's quite, it is not ridiculous although, forgive me but he liked the queen we used to talk about it quite a lot he wished he could photograph her but it was not crazy to think of him sitting and talking at a pool match with the Duke of Edinburgh he sort of looked like he would fit in fine so, it's absolutely true I knew don't suggest you go out to a restaurant why? because he won't let you pay for him and he can't afford to pay therefore do something else I don't remember that oh, I used to do it and that's why I cook for him all the time especially I mean you know, in Peter Hootar's day I paid for that Chinese dinner that's 7.95 Chinese dinner he did buy you the coke, sir the other thing about Peter he did not stiff on his, on printing he left a huge number of prints and that paper was not inexpensive but I can tell you something Peter would check out all the venues that sold the paper and he would learn exactly the day that the paper would become obsolete so it would drop to half price it was made outdated outdated and he knew perfectly well that it was still great paper there was no problem and he would arrive at opening of the store that day to buy half price paper I think it's interesting to talk about why Peter never got successful like in the bigger world a critic once wrote that Maples Orc had the success that Peter Hootar should have had and it was true he wouldn't compromise I think that was the bottom line the real problem actually is if you were alive today I think you would be very impressed for the exhibitions that just happened like this traveling show but given those curators it would be a tough time so maybe there would have been half the number of venues he was just so tough but he wouldn't compromise that he wasn't going to compromise obviously that no compromise was a good thing on some level it allowed him to keep doing great work but it did keep him from being successful and famous in his own time he was famous in our world about this business I mean it was very difficult for me to come to realize that Peter first of all would not compromise but he had a thing about success that was deep and troubled and I never fully understood it that he was also craved it wanted it very much and also it wasn't possible for him I remember on occasion which made that change my whole life he was having dinner with me and he was explaining why he wasn't going to do some suggestion to do something to show in some place and I thought the argument of why he wasn't going to do it was not very persuasive and I got a little myth Peter, if I had another life I know I could make you successful I know I could make you known if I were in charge of doing it and I was thinking ooh what a nice idea I could be a paper manager and then I thought do you want to commit suicide? because I had tried to take over Peter's work I wouldn't have been dead within 10 days he would have killed me which is that simple so it was even then I didn't say how would you like me to be your manager I wasn't that dumb but it was it was really true he was going to be himself no matter what it meant I think a lot of us felt like we wish we could do this for Peter we wish we could find someone to be the ideal dealer the person to take his hand so he wouldn't have to deal with all this stuff I remember his horror of studio visits that they were just the worst thing in the world for him it was so difficult he couldn't handle that and I kept saying you need someone just to do it for you you don't need to be there someone just to take it and show it of course that never happened but I kept thinking there had to be some way to prevent him from making things difficult for himself and for allowing the work to get out into the world I actually have a question you guys can answer I don't think he ever published and he never wrote about his own work there was nothing published he was interviewed this interview came out well it was written and published very recently and I know that there was a time where he was invited to give a talk at a university upstate where he froze I read about that maybe in the Morgan Library but I was wondering did he talk about his work like did constantly he really thought he was good how did he talk about it he really knew that his work was great he actually did he really knew that and he knew exactly how to talk about it and those were most of our conversations actually he would never have used the word great that I now feel free to use about it but I can tell you that for example he would leave various kinds of prints in the box not because he thought they were all great but he said after I'm gone scholars would want to know how I reached his own there's no question and he believed that he would be famous after he died that was his man that he believed in and it was right of course well I'm saying that I found out from working with somebody Francis who also works with the archive Peter Rouge archive is that nothing is allowed to be printed that he didn't print in his lifetime correct that is such a precise legacy so much respect for that so much I made one exception there was when he did the catacombs he did a snap of Paul when he did the catacombs in Palermo Paul Tech was with him and he turned around and did a snap of Paul standing near the corpses and I thought this he never printed it and I thought this one is really interesting and so I will put it out as a historical document it's not a theater you allowed to be reproduced I allowed to be reproduced and it's not quite widely known but it is not a picture that Peter regarded as part of his work he was actually a really great editor this was talking about all those contact sheets you know that's the great thing Francis has been sort of in a way cataloging so we were shown all the contact sheets of the two of us like you know all that and they were terrible sessions I mean there were some sessions that he would have gone near do you know what I mean they literally were failures they were failure sessions some of the archive he overexposed they're very flat negatives very flat very very detailed negatives they're very flat and then he printed darks and then he started from a huge amount of information in the negative and then began to discard in order to edit the image to frame the image so he would get rid of information in the shadows like myth and graphic blacks often in order to enhance the meaning of when he talks about that Alan Ginsberg photo which he was really wrong he must have done a huge amount of work even like reaching an eye or a cheek still a boring picture still a boring picture probably produced yeah but there was no photoshop then I want people to know all of this was done with integrity oh she got better that's another conversation we've been going we want to talk about his animals though I have to say that's what I'm looking at the most right now nobody has ever photographed animals like that and from what I understand of his biography and I didn't know was that he grew up on a farm but the first creatures he must have had communion with were animals and none of his animals are species they're specific they're individuals and they have such trust and he gets as close to them as he gets to any person and he actually speaks deeply that picture right there he told me that he was based it on Cecil Beaton's portrait of the Queen Mother I remember once he visited me I was away from summer vacation and he visited me in the country and we would go out for drives and one of the things that happened very typically with Peter we'd be driving along and as usual I would be talking and he'd say stop I'd stop the car wait here a minute and then climb over a barbed wire fence and go out to a bunch of cows and I would wait and one minute became 5 minutes 10 minutes became 15 minutes finally after half an hour I thought maybe I'd better go back something bad never happened I mean I'll go and he would walk in I walked up to him and he was talking to the cows he was having long elaborate conversations with them saying you know you feel this way but I know you don't like that one you know there would be a whole discussion going on and he was not glad that I'd come to find him I had to go and sit aside for another hour while he talked to the cows but they talked back to him and they talked back you should talk at this I mean your book has so much of the animal for us your yeah I could say a few words yeah I think his animal portraits kind of influenced me for a very long time on a maybe more subliminal level I had dogs for a long time and I photographed them and I think I always had Peter Hachar at the back of my mind even if I didn't know it the first dog at least and then I I was invited to do this show to you know to create a show of which I was working with my own at Gallerie Recults in the land and subsequently this book came out of it and I I was like you know I was really thinking about the animal portraits I was spending a lot of time with horses lately and so I was like maybe unconscious where I was thinking about photographing the dogs decades before for the show I was trying to come up with some really good horse photographs and I say this in the book I wrote some notes at the back and I've long admired Huchar's ability to get really extraordinary and it was only when I tried to do it myself that I realized how unbelievably hard it is especially with horses because they don't stand still they're shaking off flies with their mains and tails or they're eating they're never cows as well but they're just eating all the time it's an interesting portrait with the head down eating there's no eating in this no, there's no eating I'll just tell one little anecdote I was using the wrong shutter speed for my photographs of horses and they're covered in flies so even though some of my friends had the horse not the word the flies or the word all over the face of the horse I thought failure to decide but here's something that I discovered recently I went to visit Gary and he told me about printing maybe the most famous Huchar horse photo and Gary discovered a fly on the rump of the horse perfectly sharp and in focus but Peter had printed it he had printed it down so he couldn't see it I would have died for that perfectly sharp still what he would have done is he would have spotted it out he would have actually retouched it out and then he left it in because the print didn't get to John for his photo that flies are there he photograph death a lot and I think to me there was no morbidity in it it was accepted it was like the way you photograph anything it's there he connects to it and one of my very favorite pictures is a seagull on the sand his head is up it's all about mortality it's really touching yeah something's out of focus in it it's like one of the only pictures that has a background that's out of focus it's an extraordinary picture I'm afraid that there's a problem with time at this point there Peter was never somebody who wished much to be a filmmaker that I know of at least he never discussed it with me much to see a lot of movies but he did make a brief film of Ethel which we now can show here now about that is Ethel talking about Peter there's another one that was made by Peter which we can see now after which since I think this is a very very live wire audience I think we should help you in that so let's take a look let's see if there are some questions anybody's question I can tell you that he revered Charles Loughlin he thought that Charles Loughlin he called him our cocktail as I do as a theatrical genus I don't know much about personal relations with him I can tell you that one problem with Ethel was Ethel was very possessive of Peter and in so far as Peter seemed to be involved with me Ethel wished that I would then did not get along with me and released it others may know a lot more about this actually how well do you remember how well do you remember oh I remember it very well what's the fear for a theater that Harry trusted for the theater wasn't it both Ethel and Peter Ethel performed as King Elizabeth King Elizabeth it was not it was Queen Elizabeth I who was impersonated by Ethel and did a performance an area at those days would give parties prior to the hours when people were supposed to arrive as a way of climbing the pump and they would give you a party if they thought you would have a lot of people coming and it happened and it was Peter absolutely loved it and it was a great occasion for him for the 15th birthday he lived with him more years they were incredible maybe Ethel was really his best friend they were really close well David David was a little bit when David came along I knew I was no longer his best friend oh yeah that could happen oh yeah but talking about he talked about Peter not being known they were that party was very crowded and then when he had his opening party after Gracie's opening and of course he had a beat up on Gracie actually that was the one exhibition where he was really happy and so on you want to know why? the situation with Gracie went beautifully because it was entirely stage managed by David oh that's true I mean David learned a thought that Peter didn't have a dealer and went to Gracie to show Peter Luther and she took about three minutes to say yes let's do it but after that David was present for everything and he was diplomatic in a way that was not always where is Gracie? where is Gracie? stand up am I accurate? no I'm going to turn this to Peter to do the installation but I do want to say one thing when I hear all these stories about how difficult Peter was Peter participated in some of the most crazy shows that I came up with like a portrait show where if you agreed to be in this show you would agree to take portraits of anybody that anybody would come and ask any of the artists for a portrait you would have to agree to do it and there was like a set price of the artists up on it I thought it was a brilliant idea and Peter agreed to that and to the famous show and like you said he was my experience with him was wonderful but sir really worked with him to do the installation my experience with Peter is that he had this idea for doing a show and he wanted to show 100 photographs that was 100 prints and he had a very specific way about how he wanted it to work come and I think Gracie and I just stepped back and said lay it out the way you want to be laid out and for the only time that was the only show that I didn't install we got these super high end installers because he had a stuff cut on the mat so it just sheets a glass on it to install the work exactly to the specifications so we just said yes to everything that he wanted and he hadn't looked exactly the way that he wanted to look and we were fine with it and he was very happy he used to sit in the open and talk to me he was incredibly generous he gave me that photograph of the girl with the ball that's a really cool just as a gift we used to sit there and talk for hours he was very nice not difficult at all we heard he was selling prints out of his studio during the show but I remember asking you if David showed up to help him and you said no in that case I'm disinformed and I take it back I'm sorry David came in and said you have to do the show with Peter Bouchard and of course we agreed to do it because David said that it should be important I was a little bit afraid of Peter Bouchard for years because I was a roommate with Jackie Curtis for a while and she had told me that Peter Bouchard stole her loft I believe that Peter Bouchard was like this person to keep away from because he was this awful person in the 70s when he came to the gallery he was like this is this awful person but I guess it's kind of okay he was the sweetest person Stephen was like in one thing you were correct to say that you know Gracie was David's gallery right and so that was a huge deal for him because he had to do a so much of it and so trusting of him they were like you know father, son or brothers or whatever they were family and so he wouldn't trust of you because David trusted you but let me just ask sort of something because my memory of this was Peter moved those things around a zillion times before he came to the gallery that sounds right he was very very particular and I remember him commenting on the photograph of the animals he didn't like things to be grouped together he liked to be a lot of different so he really felt this on the photograph but he told me that he felt the cow portraits were like self portraits because he thought he looked like the cows he had a of there's a whole weird part of Peter that he just was broken down which I want to ruin the whole question but because I could tell you a lot about it it was Peter was one of the best looking people of his generation he was fantastically good looking he believed because his mother had told him he used to sometimes get on a bus and look for as remote as he could find someone would have to look at it it's an absolutely horrible fact nothing would change his mind about that no matter how everyone I introduced to him was immediately in love with him that didn't change anything about how he felt about himself but it was bizarre I mean live in a world where perhaps you used to say Peter's huge art really was looking at Anthony Perkins and and but it's very interesting that that was true the other thing I would have to add as part of the magic of the great love that happened between Peter and David is that okay but one of the great love is that they were at heart rage of hollocks they sitting on fury horrible fury in both of them except with each other there it was peace and it's one of the most remarkable fact that these two rage of hollocks were so bound together in such a beautiful way and any more questions yeah I want to thank the panel it's true for what I'm studying over here do you fancy I know I hear a voice oh yes of course thank the panelist for bringing Peter into the room about how he felt that he should be in love and touched on that but what you're hearing is so there's so many levels of Peter and it's like his photo sessions I just wanted to talk there's someone who lived with that I have another level of understanding of Peter which is not important to talk about at this moment but in this work he would sit with you for hours and hours and hours until all the masks went into a photo session until he got you to that needed not so much physically but it could be emotional psychic place and that was his dream list he would be with you he'd have sex with you whatever it needed to have to get to that moment and that's what's in those photographs that you see it's just not silence it's a very loud human element that we all hide to survive I just wanted to also say about probably the best you know in the public view of this images is the day of liberation from a poster and it's being misused by the archive by the script of how Peter did that photograph it's untypical of any other work that he's done the day of liberation from a poster well it's someone who set it up with him he's not working at the time it was for the day of liberation from and it says come out join the sisters and brothers of the day of liberation from and he did that it's not typical of any of his other work and it's in talking about it and stripping all of the meaning of what he did in his work and I think that we also need to know that this incredibly creative sensitive handsome man like many J.M.A. was deeply deeply damaged by his mother and that he carried with him all his life there's many more stories that could be told about Peter if I had one more person call me you know I had sex with Peter and blah blah blah and I said why are you telling me this I know we had sex with everybody here but I have love letters from him that talks about how he struggles with that and that side of Peter is the personal that's the side that downtown meant to Peter Jackie's grandmother was very much involved in that work situation and Jackie liked to be high drawn with Jackie who loved Peter he took a series of photos of Jackie for the cover of the magazine that I was the editor of in which you saw the male and you saw Jackie's fantasy of himself as the female Jackie and the publishers refused to print them because they wound up it was about the new sexual activity they wanted to have a cover of two girls and a man but those I think are really off course and I hope that people have a chance to look at those photographs because you really see who Jackie actually was we got time for maybe one or two more questions and then there's a reception out in the lobby I just had to return to the Gracie Mansion show and the animal photographs I was curious how he talked about the animal photographs in relation to the portraits we've mentioned portraits in life and death and the sequencing of that and you know the show with Gracie Mansion had such a different type of sequencing that he was doing this earlier the earlier stages of his career and they brought in the animal photographs and I was curious if you all could speak to how he discussed those photographs with you all Gracie that's the animal photographs I mean the animal photographs were portraits as were but then there was also the photographs of Trash and other the landscapes and very little amounts of them would you go into these portraits in New Jersey I was I hoped and selected I was within selecting that show so you're the one it's my part I didn't know that oh yeah yeah what you really wanted to do with that show was give every and actually serve center he wanted every photograph whatever it was it was a bush or a burnt out trash or a burnt out like this a room on the pier or a portrait or a drag queen he wanted every single image to have equal space or equal place and that show juxtaposing opposites or juxtaposing contrasts and so maybe it was Gracie that said you could see like when you see shows that are humongous style and very close together it's really difficult to pull up an image you know one particular with that show it was extraordinary it was truly successful because you could see what you looked at without being interrupted by the others you know I mean it's also because he brought the same level of technique seeing and you know just like photographic genius to everything like a photograph but I like your point about how portraits of life and death is really distinctive and that it goes against this other model of life time but it does really go against the other model of mixing up genres time for one more question before the reception thank you for this conversation which has been really enlightening and one of the things that I'm most interested in is the friendships that you've barely we've it's been a tip of the iceberg to understand what the man and the friendship was for all of you I'd like to have your friends become a public figure since his death and how that affected you as someone who had such a private experience with him during his life I always knew as I said in the beginning I didn't truly understand Peter's work for several years before I really the scales fell from my eyes and I really saw it but from the jump and certainly from long before he died I knew that he was destined to be known that if he weren't going to be known something terrible and very inappropriate would have happened it's like he was almost famous never thought he was poor and he was always famous that's the way it's up and I I never doubted when I got the job of essentially bringing him out of quote obscurity into high visibility I never doubted for a moment that that's what should be done that was perfectly clear actually I find this conversation wonderful to be very upsetting it really makes me this asshole but even more Peter and into your question I'm kind of used to I've watched a lot of people who've passed become cookie miller, David Wunderovich become more and more public figures and I think it's amazing and wonderful gratifying I just hope that people have so many lectures to the new generations as in other and I just want people to really look at Peter's work and not think about what was the A.B.C. New York and not the services I want people to really take the time to look at Peter's work I really don't have much to add to what Nan said because it is incredibly gratifying to know someone who struggled at his own time who knew and needed to be better known and deserved to be better known and to to watch him kind of pull together life month by month and how difficult that was and regret that he's not around to benefit from this but again know that he would have made it difficult for anyone sadly what is kind of extraordinary about it is this is a really new audience you know I mean this is not an audience that knew him most his audience was very dedicated but somewhat small during his life absolutely and when I spoke began this discussion by saying that when I when I got the job I always thought well he's a remarkable photographer but he's hard it's very difficult people can't see the beauty of it it's difficult it's going to be a hard sell I understand and one of the real changes is in the generations which is I see now people who are born after Peter dying they all get it right away if there wasn't that absolute I was not the only dumb cough that thought this is difficult work a lot of people thought it was but not Abaddon Abaddon was his first collective absolutely and Abaddon saw in Peter the potential of his work when he and Arbus were in the master class for Abaddon and Abaddon kept buying photos to keep him with food but because he pressured the work from the very beginning to people that never to Peter understood absolutely it was amazing that Abaddon senior levels of art as photography as art in this country he was at the senior levels of art as photography as art in this country he was recognized right away they all knew it was the rest of the machine rate of publicity that he couldn't reach I think it's also the fact that photography is seen in a very different way over these SMEs absolutely it didn't have the respect or the place in the larger art world that it now has it still was a kind of lesser much lesser that has a lot to do with all kind of re-evaluations of various reputations including Peter he used to say blow it up and they'll call it art it was huge so please join us