Photo of the Week #317

October 30, 2014
To call this photograph unguarded would be an understatement. Peter Hujar put his camera—and thus our viewpoint—right in the middle of a scene of anarchic and unselfconscious playground fun. By filling the frame with the monkey-bars, a complex tangle of lines and curves seems to surround the children like a kind of whirlwind they have generated. The contemplative look of the boy in the foreground could easily be seen as a stand in for Hujar, positioned slightly apart while looking into this lively scene with thoughtful interest.

This photograph was made when Peter Hujar was 23 years old, and is from a series that is considered to be his earliest mature work: a group of photographs that he made produced during a visit to Southbury Training School, a school for children with intellectual disabilities. This vintage photograph is one of the earliest examples of the working methods that would occupy him throughout his distinguished and all-too-brief career, specifically a candid and deeply sympathetic approach to documenting groups of people leading rich lives slightly outside of society’s mainstream.