Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

I curated myself with Peter Hujar; a risky act, but it was an invitation I could not resist. I began by listing categories of images I wanted to see: animals, water, Latino men, body parts, NYC, babies. I’ve long been familiar with Hujar’s work and chose images I knew I could be in conversation with, but I also tried as much as possible to select from amongst his lesser-known works, in particular ones that have rarely if ever been shown. Together with Nicolas Linnert and Nick Irvin we visited the archive in Queens—and as we sifted through prints, Stephen Koch, trustee of the estate, told stories and anecdotes of Peter Hujar, and approved of my selections, saying that in terms of my stated goal, to choose from the unreleased prints, I was “batting a thousand.”

I knew I wanted the close-up of the tiny baby (John McLellan) latched onto his mother’s breast, his little hand right there on the breast as well, and her hands supporting his head and lower body. You can tell he is actively sucking and pressing his fingers into the breast. He wears an old-fashioned terry ‘sleeper,’ the kind I recognize from childhood. In a second photo, Hujar pulls back and we see the full dyad, John’s mother, Dina, beatific, lit like a Madonna. John is still on the breast but his mouth is slack and now he’s sleeping, and Dina’s eyes are cast downward and her left hand takes the measure of her infant’s small frame.

But it’s the close-up of John that really gets me, makes me think of his utter vulnerability and dependence on caregivers and makes me remember my own tiny baby when I had one, and how difficult it was, and how people can tell you it will be hard but you have no idea until it is happening to you. Dina could be feeling all of this in the photo, or not. We have no idea.

It was not on my list, but while at the archive Hedi Sorger was leafing through prints and came upon Two South African Actresses. I guessed they were from the Market Theater in Johannesburg, an institution founded by my partner’s uncle, the playwright and director Barney Simon. I showed the image to Jason (Simon), who immediately recognized the older actress, Sophie Mgcina, and the play, which he’d seen and worked on in NY, titled The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena.

But he didn’t recognize the younger actress in the photo, and so some sleuthing began and he and a former student of his working in the archives of the NYPL eventually uncovered her identity, via a listing of a London production of the play which used the Hujar image in its promotional poster and identified the younger woman in the photo as the understudy (Thuli Dumakude).

Everyone agrees Hujar was unrivaled when it came to photographing animals. His horses and cows and dogs peer into the lens as though hypnotized, sometimes in pairs, and there is an immobility to these images that is truly novel, as animals don’t hold still, except for Hujar, who talked to them and connected with farm animals in rural Pennsylvania, and chickens and a rooster in the deep south in the 1950s, where he made images that are surprisingly reminiscent of the famous FSA photographs.

I unexpectedly photographed chickens at the home of the political theorist Dalie Giroux (from my film i confess), in the woods of La Pêche, Quebec. I’d gone there to photograph Dalie, but ended up shooting her animals instead. There wasn’t much light, it was early June and mostly raining, and voracious mosquitos swarmed us from all sides, which meant I was focusing the already difficult-to-focus Hasselblad wearing a mosquito net over my face, and of course the animals never stopped moving.

We visited her neighbor, the painter John Eaton, and I photographed him together with his magnificent white Percheron, Goya, who wore a custom-made, black-studded halter and roamed the yard like a dog..

Back in New York I continued to photograph horses, attempting to channel Hujar. It was August and baking hot, and I’d limbo my body through electric wire fence to reach the horses, covered in flies, some of them standing in pairs, mane-to-tail in a lovely ritual of mutual fly-swishing. I’ve never more appreciated Hujar’s photographic genius than in these flawed attempts of my own to commune with equines, as he apparently did, coaxing the animals as he took their picture.