Carlos Valladaras at Art in America:
“Is this boring?” Peter Hujar asked while narrating a day in his life: December 18, 1974.
“No. It’s not boring to me,” Linda Rosenkrantz—a writer, his friend—replied as she listened to the photographer recount minutiae. In Ira Sachs’s new film, we see her loving all that he is saying, knowing that one day soon he won’t be here, and that all we’ll have then are the photographs, the memories, the traces of what he did.
This one day makes up Peter Hujar’s Day, wherein a great American filmmaker offers one of his strongest films to date—as well as one of the most accurate depictions I know of the internal doubts that plague an artist. On that winter day in 1974, Rosenkrantz recorded Hujar’s quiet but compelling account: He woke up, talked to editors, tried to produce good photographs, worried about not doing enough as an artist. Rosenkrantz went on to type up a transcript of her conversation with Hujar, who died 13 years later, on November 26, 1987, of AIDS-related complications. She left the text untouched for nearly 50 years, until she rediscovered and published it as a book, to wide acclaim, in 2021.
more here.
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