Peter Hujar and Paul Thek never look happier, together or apart, than in a photo of them side by side on Fire Island in 1961. Tall and lean in swimming trunks, with the sea behind them, both men are reacting to something out of shot, Thek smiling sweetly, while Hujar, who is hairier and rather more muscular, grins widely and bares his long upper gums in a way that I don’t think is seen in any other photo of him. It gives us a moment of intimate access, sixty-five years later, to a Peter Hujar who is otherwise unknown to us, the man Thek knew, and loved. The happiness was real, for a time, but the two artists, each with his own distinct problems and needs, were not going to be happy together, or with anyone else, for long. Both found loving difficult, Thek with recurrent uncertainties about his sexuality—he slept with Susan Sontag, their close friend at the time, and talked of wanting to have a child with her. Hujar’s personal reserve was clearly a part of his appeal, a magnetic reticence, but it betokened a deeper inability to give himself. And besides, was romantic happiness, conventionally conceived, what either man wanted?

To read an individual, or a milieu, through photographs can be, at its best, to see deep and to know how fragile the chance of such a revelation was; the caught moment endures to reveal, to typify, and to invite interpretation. In The Wonderful World That Almost Was, Andrew Durbin reaches several times for the never-quite-explicable nature of the camera’s insights, both the subject’s experience of being acutely seen and the viewer’s conviction of access to a person they may otherwise know little or nothing about. He describes how in Hujar’s early photos of his teacher Daisy Aldan we see her slip free of self-consciousness into “an almost revelatory inner state”; Hujar’s friend Ann Wilson spoke of his “gorgeous mental discretion”—an openness of vision and an instinct for selection—which uncovered “the inmost selves of his subjects.” This is the magic of good portraiture in any medium, but the instantaneous analysis of the camera is the more uncanny, and it’s clear that for the troubled and often taciturn Hujar, photography was a vital means of engagement not only with the larger world but with his own inner being. In his many photographs of Thek over nearly two decades he found, Durbin feels, a kind of revelation, an understanding of “unseen parts of himself.” Even someone who has not had the wrenching experience of reading his book would surely find these portraits exceptionally moving.

The two men had met five years earlier in Florida, when each was with a different partner, and Hujar’s first photos of Thek, in and around a house in Coral Gables, are the record of a coolly charged encounter between an unknown twenty-three-year-old artist and an uncannily attentive photographer a year younger than him. Thek perches on a spindly sofa in a bare-floored room, with an array of potted plants in front of the window; he is obliging but not passive, and seems hemmed in, an outdoor creature domestically confined; his long legs stretch out in front of him, then he’s barefoot and sitting on the floor. We can’t help but read his expression through the lens of hindsight—it seems by turns questioning, seductive, and opaque. Out of the house, in white shorts, he reclines on the ground in a pine glade, where Hujar too is photographed against the trees. The youthful softness of both young men, Hujar dark, Thek fairer, is very notable, and it’s a heightened and inexorable feature of this particular story that we will watch them as they age and are weathered by difficult and in the end fatal experience.

Durbin’s absorbing and original book is a joint biography, a vividly detailed account of the years the two men were part of each other’s lives, though for much of that time not together. He keeps their two stories on the move, intertwines them when he can, and produces a narrative as hard to summarize as life itself. The childhood years, rich in significance for both men, are quickly dealt with, six pages for Hujar and five for Thek. This skipping over material a traditional biographer might have raked through in detail is a little disconcerting, though the determining facts emerge clearly. Thek was born in 1933 in Brooklyn to a German father and an Irish mother and grew up from the age of seven in Floral Park on Long Island, in a casually Catholic household, with three siblings. What their father’s job was is not stated, though it took him “gray-suited” to the city, and his discovery of Paul’s homosexuality made relations between them lastingly difficult; in his father’s absence his mother developed a heavy reliance on drink.

Hujar, born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, was also the child of an alcoholic mother, a waitress; he had no memory of his absconded father and was brought up on the farm of his mother’s parents, who were Ukrainian—Ukrainian was apparently his first language. Anyone who has spent time on a farm as a child will feel the subtle force of his many later photographs of cows and horses, the sense of sought-for solidarity and proximate friendship with nonhuman neighbors. At the age of eleven he was sent back to live with his mother and her new husband, a bookie, in a one-bedroom apartment on East 32nd Street; his habits of watchful silence, the lack of love and fear of loving, the anger that came with powerlessness, all seem to stem from these formative years. In adult life his rages would be terrifyingly violent, at times nearly murderous; his friend Vince Aletti said he was “the angriest person I knew”; Fran Lebowitz, also a close longtime friend, thought he “never learned to be in the world, not one bit”—a child’s bewilderment that persisted in the grown-up artist and was a key to the decades-long quest of his work.

Both men died of AIDS-related illnesses, Hujar in November 1987, nine months before Thek. Durbin’s intention is to tell their story, to create his own portrait of the time they shared, with no premonition of the catastrophe that awaited them and their world. The last decade of their separate lives is covered in ten pages. The effect is again startling, but unusually akin to the understanding we may have in real life of those we meet in adulthood, are close to for a while, and then lose touch with, their prior and subsequent stories a matter of anecdote, of random news and reported sightings. The poignancy of the book stems in part from the messiness and irresolution of the narrative, and also from Durbin’s proper reluctance to force form on the struggles of two such conflicted and often unaccommodating characters, who for the greater part of their lives had nothing to do with each other. But the result is also tantalizing, leaving you hungry for a fuller account of Thek’s life in particular: you worry about him as you might about a self-destructive friend you’re unable, in the end, to help.

Durbin was born not long after his subjects died, and he is understandably magnetized by their epoch, astonishing for its claiming of new freedoms, its roil of political optimism and disillusion, and the pervasive possibility, central to his story, of seizing chances for change, for personal metamorphosis and growth. It has too the glamour of a legendary party that he missed, and at which his book will make him magically an observer, and almost a participant. His tone at times is that of someone less researching than remembering a particular scene, the brilliant people, the talk and the laughter, the dancing till dawn in long-vanished clubs. At moments he’s recalling the larger mood of the time: “There was always something incongruous and contradictory about gay relationships in the early part of the decade.” Then he’s up close with his principals: “It was the way Paul stared at you, as if his absorbing blue eyes were endowed with X-ray powers. Just made you swoon.”

He has a keen sense of the physical presence and sexiness of both men. In his Cooper Union yearbook Thek was “the boy with the most beautiful eyes,” and later his “sensuous power” is acknowledged and takes on a symbolic charge: “The era itself emanated from his body: The 1960s felt of Paul, and Paul the 1960s.” We learn too (a rare thing in biography) of his “beautiful voice,” “his most seductive device.” But it’s Hujar whom Durbin seems keener on. “Of course, he was beautiful,” he writes, with “a smile that could make anything look sexy” and a “beautiful face.” He has contemporary support for this: “Men and women found him terribly handsome,” and Hujar’s friend Sheyla Baykal described him as “so beautiful, tall. Intense. Intelligent looking.” Readers can study the many self-portraits and work out what they feel about him; it’s the frank physical admiration of male author for male subject that’s refreshing, and a part of the book’s immersive feel.

A more conventional approach might occasionally have been useful. The artist Ann Wilson is knocking around in the story, like the good friend she was, for nearly two hundred pages before Durbin formally introduces her and tells us how she and Hujar met; in Rome, where Hujar had gone on a Fulbright in 1962, Cy Twombly and Federico Fellini are abruptly good friends to the two younger artists; others, minor figures in a scene fast receding into the past, bob in and out as if we really should know who they are. Indeed a latent motif of the book, to do with fame and transience, seems encoded in the fleeting presence of these unexplained actors and dancers. Durbin falls back on unsupported presumptions—as in “The ancient sculpture must have caught Paul’s eye”—surprisingly rarely, considering the mysteries of his two subjects’ thoughts and experiences, but he often speaks for them, or through them. “Paul’s love could make you feel light, a lightness Peter craved in most romantic relationships.” “Love was power and torment for Paul, and for Peter, a temporary relief.” “Seeing them filled their friends with wonder, and even a little envy, that two people could really be so close.” This is on the romantic, novelistic side of biography, though such interpretative touches form part of a consistent and convincing whole.

Of the two artists, Hujar has the photographer’s obvious advantage: his work is widely reproduced, and much of it is now internationally known, from exhibitions, books, and online archives. Though some of his major breakthroughs occurred in Italy, he is above all a New York photographer, born halfway between Diane Arbus, who he felt looked down on him, and Robert Mapplethorpe, unmentioned in Durbin’s book though described by him elsewhere as Hujar’s “long-time nemesis…whose work he often mocked and dismissed”^*; in the Morgan Library’s exhibition “Hujar:Contact,” he’s glimpsed, leather-jacketed in a bar, in 1981. If Hujar can at moments be compared with both these more famous figures, his empathetic portraiture could rarely be confused with theirs. Certainly his early photos of children in an orthopedic hospital in Florence have a radiant sense of communicated tenderness and joy that sets them apart from Arbus’s work; when he took them, Hujar was traveling with an earlier boyfriend, the painter Joseph Raffael, who was in Italy on his own Fulbright scholarship, and a sense of displacement in a strange country surely precipitates new insight into the “richness of the children’s inner lives.” His pictures of two leathermen, Jay and Fernando, making out in 1967 seem a forerunner of Mapplethorpe’s Bobby and Larry Kissing twelve years later, but for Durbin these are only preparatory stages in Hujar’s development, studies of a sexual type, lacking the personal insight that would characterize his later, often more explicit sex photos. The aesthetic, monumental, almost abstract nature of Mapplethorpe’s treatment of the male body was not to be Hujar’s way.

He did copious commercial work to get by, most significantly as chief assistant in Harold Krieger’s busy Midtown studio between 1964 and 1968. Here he developed, in parallel and after hours, his own obsessions with light and with the ways, very different from posing a fashion model, that the essence of an individual might be captured. The brilliance of his portraits lay always in finding a connection that bypassed the routine and artificial contract of the sitting. This was a two-way thing, and unpredictable. In Ira Sachs’s film Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), based on transcripts of a conversation with his friend Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974, he’s frustrated by a shoot with Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times: “There’s very little there…. It’s not that he didn’t give out. We didn’t connect”; and indeed the photo, of Ginsberg sitting cross-legged in an abandoned shop doorway, straight on but with eyes askance, distinctly conveys a lack of shared purpose, the all-too-common scenario of making do for a press deadline.

The opposite occurs in an outdoor shoot with Roberto Rossellini six years earlier, which takes rich advantage of a group of kids playing in an urban park, mere happenstance that both director and photographer yield to and explore: the children’s excitement at being in the picture infects the large, balding, suited Rossellini, and he stands smiling among them, surprised, amused, and above all in a live communication with Hujar. The children are not exploited for effect but are participants in a cheerfully impromptu occasion with unexpected rewards. It would be more and more the case that Hujar flourished artistically as the recorder of his own milieu of artists, writers, and especially performers: the reticent observer reveling in the performative exuberance of others.

To Durbin, he is “one of the greatest American portraitists of all time.” And his work extended beyond portraiture: to be in downtown New York through the 1970s was to move in a city in physical decay, and he had long been a feeling recorder of urban dereliction, seeing in it both the trace (enigmatic, amusing, sad) of what had gone and the lurking promise of the life that thrived in the ruins. There’s a palpable tension in these empty downtown streets and abandoned buildings, a nervy expectation in the shadows. His studies of men cruising on the abandoned West Side piers are in their way both townscapes and portraits, the artist’s habit of seeing and his search for sex fused in a complex image of a time and a place where everyone is on the lookout.

Compared to Hujar’s memorable body of work, Thek’s is more elusive and its status more uncertain. A fair bit of it was destroyed, sometimes thrown out from his New York apartment during his absences in Europe, crises that he typically found liberating and regenerative; other sculptural works, installations and “environments,” intrinsically more ephemeral, are harder to assess. The extreme variety of his creative work speaks to irresolvable dualities, pluralities, in his own nature: on the Italian island of Ponza, a favored retreat, he produced exquisitely fine landscape drawings, much as other northern artists in the Mediterranean world had been making for centuries; in Norway, in Italy, or on Fire Island he was a rapturous recorder in fairly conventional means of the beauties of sea, sunlight, and the life of the body; in a tower in Sicily he fixated on painting a sequence of black-and-white Television Analyzations—for example, a woman’s neck and chin seen in close-up on a TV screen; while for shows in Italy, Holland, and New York he produced simulations in wax of bleeding meat and severed body parts, so realistic that they made many viewers “sick to their stomachs.” Some of these were exhibited in Technological Reliquaries, sleekly modernist vitrines of yellow-tinted Plexiglass, which only made them more sinister. Later, in the years beyond Durbin’s detailed study, his paintings were increasingly centered on words and slogans—“diligence,” “HURRAH VACUII,” “Afflict the comfortable COMFORT THE AFFLICTED”—which can seem rather private and profitless after what had come before.

Durbin recounts how the installations were set up, at (or sometimes after) the last minute, with the help of collaborators, eloquent fusions of the improvised and the fiercely determined. In The Tomb a cast of Thek’s own body, assembled Frankenstein-wise in many parts, lies in jeans and a double-breasted jacket, the entire figure, except for the long blond wig and mustache, painted a pale lilac pink. Its purple tongue protrudes, as if waiting, perhaps, to receive the sacrament. Nicknamed “the Hippie,” it was displayed at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in 1967, laid out with various grave goods inside a carpentered pink pyramid with a single entrance for the nervous viewer to peer in. A photo in The Village Voice showed Thek, looking fit and well, posing in the tomb beside his 3D image of his own corpse. This ritual offering was perhaps a further liberation—he had staged his own funeral and was free to move on—while the work unsurprisingly attracted widespread interpretation, both personal and political. It was a protest against American state violence, at home and abroad; it was a memorial to the idealism of a young artist and a critique of the culture in which he had tried to thrive.

Durbin reckons this lost installation a “masterpiece of 1960s American sculpture,” and his descriptions of it, and of Thek’s work in various media, are all the more welcome in this sadly underillustrated book (one central gathering of small black-and-white images, two or three to the page, as in any conventional biography published in the past sixty years). You have to keep turning to online resources and to other books. Paul Thek: Diver, the large volume connected to the Whitney’s retrospective of his work fifteen years ago, is the most useful guide I’ve found to reconstructing a partly lost corpus: it documents how things were and shows what survives. And part of the interest of a lovely exhibition, “Paul Thek: Seized by Joy,” at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London last summer was that it combined some rich early landscapes and still lifes painted on newspaper (a recurrent support, both for thrift and for its symbolic transience) with large luminous watercolors from the 1980s, the years after Durbin’s main narrative ends. Fire Island vistas, charged with Thek’s lifelong hunger for the sea and its shore, hung alongside atmospheric views from his apartment window of smokestacks and water tanks against the sunset.

Two photos capture moments of ambiguous calm. One, a composite by Lou Zeldis, shows him just two months before his death, perched on his sunny rooftop amid dozens of pots of orange cosmos. The Manhattan skyline, part famous, largely anonymous, stretches into the blue beyond. He wears a white tank top, as he does in Hujar’s color photo in 1966 in their shared house on Fire Island, where he sits at his newsprint-covered worktable strumming his guitar, sheet music open beside him, while a line of dismembered pink hands (with a few individual fingers and thumbs) seems to scuttle away along the ledge behind him (see illustration on page 21).

Hujar, it’s clear, wasn’t a writer. “Correspondence placed demands upon Peter that his more fluent and expressive friends could probably barely imagine,” Durbin explains. But Thek was a voluble, needy, and at his best wonderfully eloquent letter writer, and happily the costive Hujar preserved all that he received. The large album Stay away from nothing is unprefaced, unindexed, unannotated, with only a two-page afterword by Durbin to give background to what we’ve read. It is made up mainly of facsimiles of Thek’s letters from Holland or Sicily or Ponza to Hujar in Rome or back in the US, most of them tightly typed to use all the space, others handwritten, sometimes in capital letters. The nearly weightless aerograms, now creased and crumpled, are reproduced on heavier stock, but we have the experience of seeing exactly the page that Thek typed, folded, sealed with the tip of his tongue along its gummed edges, and mailed, and that a week or so later Hujar carefully snicked open and read. We are the proxy recipients of these letters, stopping and squinting at times to make them out, and their articulated ecstasies, bewilderments, and plunges into drug-muddled craziness bring us into an intimate relation with Thek of a kind we will never so explicitly have with Hujar. Small gatherings of Hujar’s photographs of him mark the times they were together and add haunting eloquence to the more stumbling disclosure, across the fifteen years of Thek’s letters, of decline and alienation.

The highs are exhilarating, a postwar American version of the young artist finding himself in Europe but excited less by the antique world than by isolation in wild places, islands, and mountains. The elation begins on the first long crossing by sea in 1962, “the most exciting week of my life,” young Paul up in the crow’s nest with a 360-degree view, “like flying in all directions at once…and the magnificence goes round and round in my little head.” Physical sensation, and the interest of new places, are nonetheless secondary to his need to work, and to find a space of his own in which to do it. It’s beautiful being in Amsterdam, “but when all is said and done, I do still prefer work”—“I want to set up a studio, with orange juice, and live.” It turns out that Rome in the mid-1960s contains not just ruins, churches, and palaces but a happening and open-minded contemporary art scene, more welcoming to him than the one back home. Twombly and Fellini are indeed at work there, among many others. The Roman gallerist Topazia Alliata lends Thek a medieval tower in the village of Casteldaccia in northern Sicily, and there he seems to enter into the life of the artist in a rapturous new way. Solitude, not yet a threat, is part of it, mitigated by the adoption of a cat he names Gattopardo, after Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel. The words “happy” and “happiness” radiate through the letters, the happiness of a found routine in a place with its own immemorial seasonal life:

Again a lemon picking walk in the groves, one of the sweetest deepest happinesses of my life, tears in the eyes, what a tramonto! and everything glowing in that special Redon way, the air so filled with tiny radiating spectrums, like millions of prisms, the terraces going on hill after hill, thrusting themselves quickly forward in that special Italian way of changing landscape…. Tears in the eyes, lemons in the busta and in the pockets, if only I had another month to work here.

The rapture seems perilous in the light of what is to come. The crow’s-nest, tower-top highs are followed by a bumpy and protracted descent, the long-sought solitude becoming its own problem. Four years later, in Rome on his own Fulbright (these a critical motor of both men’s stories), he feels he should hang out with friends, but “I gotta be me I gotta be me”: people “drive me mad I can never give them what they want” (and gaps now replace punctuation). Feelings of inadequacy and paranoia deepen with his heavy intake of hash. “I am frequently stoned,” he says the following winter, and he seems increasingly unable to separate the delusions from the revelations of being so. “Apparantly Im supposed to be reborn or something,” he writes, a fuddled grasp for a lifelong principle. He grows needier, repeatedly asking Hujar to send him random things—money, butterfly wings for an artwork, sunscreen, weight-loss pills—and like most very stoned people he starts to get boring, the verbal brio dimmed. In Amsterdam again he’s on meds and seems normal, “though them that know me better know me better…a messier mind you couldn’t hardly find.”

His sexual feelings, often colored by residual Catholic guilt, perplex him. In Sicily he’d had a fantasy of being married to a woman (whom he imagines mostly as a servant) and existed “almost as if not homosexual”; now, in 1968, he’s “much much closer” with Sontag in Stockholm, though dryly mocking when Joseph Raffael turns straight and gets married. “I think hell make a very nice heterosexual,” he writes, asserting that “queer has a purpose and it seems morally wrong to me to not sleep with ones own sex too…. Hedonism and love are the only way.” There are mad exaltations—“My head is filled with wings and saints as always and there is no longer any reason to resist any of it as I am not involved other than as a receiver of gifts”—and times when you don’t know if he’s genuinely adrift or drolly self-aware. In Ponza in a sailboat in 1969: “Somehow want to do the Red Sea wherever that is I have a feeling it will work out.” Three years later, in Essen in West Germany: “I think I’ve gone mad 2 or 3 times by now, if it matters…. Please let us love each other…. Living so personalized, individualized, is becoming unbearable.”

Hujar’s later studies of him are unbearable too, in their transcendent way: wild-haired and bearded on the Fire Island shore in 1973, and neater, with a gaze both lost and challenging, in their final shoot two years later, which seems also to have been the occasion of their last significant meeting. This was for the only book of his work that Hujar was to publish, Portraits in Life and Death (1976), which presented twenty-nine images of artists, actors, and writers, including Sontag, who wrote an introduction, followed by eleven photos from the visit he and Thek had paid to the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo thirteen years earlier, where the preserved but slowly decaying corpses made a profound impression on both young men.

Throughout his biography, Durbin gives illuminating readings of many photographs, and of the masterly work Hujar did in the darkroom to manipulate an image and enrich its meaning; “Hujar:Contact” gives us further ways to explore the contingency of a shoot and the decisions that followed. The Hujar archive at the Morgan Library houses more than 5,700 contact sheets, some 110 of which are included in the exhibition, as well as the numbered job books in which he logged his shoots; as Joel Smith suggests—in the first of the brilliant short essays that punctuate the catalog—they are the closest we will ever get to a memoir by Hujar himself, a record not only of whom and what he photographed, but of the process of selection that is fundamental to creating art. Readers of the book, like visitors to the show, will want a jeweler’s loupe to read the tiny detail of the sheets, from which, once in awhile, an image is pulled out and enlarged full page. It’s an absorbing, almost magical experience. In the digital age, as Smith says, “the format of the analog contact sheet [has] a special romance of its own”—sometimes a record of rapid stabs at a subject over the twelve exposures of a roll of film, sometimes more pondered approaches to a sitter across a longer timespan. The selected “timeless” portrait can be seen among all the other shots at it—a sequence of distracting and promising possibilities.

The range of subjects is amazing in itself; if the book is a memoir by proxy it is also a portrait of an era. One of the keen insights Hujar derived from his growing interest in the group and the scene was the way a person reveals himself or herself in reaction to others; an individual portrait might result not from a traditional solo sitting but from homing in on one figure in a group shoot. His orange crayon isolates Raffael from a group of ten other artists and staff at the Stable Gallery, or finds a rapt individual face in a clustered and restless-looking shoot of the Judson Dance Theater troupe. It’s a way to catch someone smiling and laughing in natural social reaction, as against the smile solicited by the camera in a solo encounter. Hujar’s individual sitters smile little. Sontag, in the famous reclining portrait, manages a not exactly humorous curving of the lips; the reclining William Burroughs’s very faint smile is more likely produced by the weight of his head on his raised hand. But in the world of noncommercial performers that he was drawn more and more to depicting, a wild and dissident exuberance was there to be captured.

Two pages are given to the contacts for the celebrated photo of members of the Gay Liberation Front running down West 19th Street in 1970: they’re seen from far off, a rumor on the horizon, then they rush repeatedly toward the camera, coming to a standstill in a cheerful panting huddle just in front of us. The selected image became a poster—“Come Out!!”—“papered over downtown in the weeks leading up to Christopher Street Liberation Day, the first Pride Parade,” Durbin writes, though he makes a tiny mistake in transcribing the words below as “Join the brothers and sisters of the Gay Liberation Front” when it should be “the sisters and brothers.” In the photo it’s the lesbians, happy and determined and ineffably more worldly-wise, who make up the surging front row, their arms around one another, the one on the left of the line reaching back to hook forward the nearest of the long-haired young men, several of whom are nearly hidden behind the women except for their raised fists. There are traces of self-consciousness in acting out their real defiance and joy on demand for the camera, “like practicing for a musical.” It’s nonetheless a moment of release and solidarity, and the challenges ahead seem suddenly surmountable. Yet as Martin Duberman noted of the photo in his book Stonewall twenty-three years later, “these ebullient troops seem to have no backup forces”; there are a mere sixteen people on this march, and the “tsunami wave” of heightened white light that hurtles them forward seems to isolate them too.

The Wonderful World That Almost Was tells its story forward rather than through the elegiac lens of the two artists’ premature deaths, yet this image of a joyful advance can’t help but foretoken the then-unimagined tsunami of AIDS. Since we cannot read ahistorically for long, Durbin’s narrative gains a heartbreaking power from our pervasive sense of the frailty and contingency of everything it charts.