By Ted Barrow, November 10, 2025
It seems too apt to have had Peter Hujar’s 1986 Gracie Mansion exhibition on view beside Katy Grannan’s “Mad River” at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Nearly four decades apart, both photographers limn the outer limits of American bohemia: Hujar with the queer downtown demimonde of AIDS-ravaged New York, Grannan with the ephebic dreamers and elfin locals of California’s Humboldt County. Each reveals lives lived at the edge—fragile, fierce, raw and luminous in their transience—offering a moment to reconsider subject and place.
This consonance clicked when, at the end of the first room of the Hujar work, a grid of six photographs hung tightly in a hallway that was enfilade with Grannan’s “Damla, Agate Beach, CA” (2025) where a lone model dances before a coastal idyll of birds and breakers. Hujar’s eclectic bundle of snakes, rusty landscapes, ingenues, feet, spoke to a place and time separate from Grannan’s – one wants to assemble Hujar’s subjects into a story where they all know one another – while the Grannan figures are the stars in their own stages. A kinship links the two that is more than thematic. Bedraggled queens and defiant comrades find salient echoes in Grannan’s contemporary woodland models, as if the lineage of queer alterity followed the sunset to the Pacific. Even the animals recur: in the Hujar pictures, prized pets and dead dogs in alleys; in Grannan’s, a goat named Peaches steals the show, a beatific wayward saint, William Holman-Hunt’s “Scapegoat” redeemed. These creatures, domestic and mountainous alike, signal an adrift pastoral.
Both artists cultivate an unsentimental, attuned intimacy. Peter Hujar, fully embedded in the community he photographed, captured his friends with a direct tenderness, his lens a brusque probe. Grannan’s subjects are strangers encountered through a Craigslist call, yet she has described the charged hush, quoting Mary Oliver, “to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.” The results are a tense pact of attention; a dazzling equilibrium that zaps between artist and subject to us.
Katy Grannan’s pale, vaporous light—all smoky silk, faint like a scar on a ribcage—could not be further from Hujar’s dramatic baroque, whose deep shadows carve faces out of peaks and hollows. His prints often feel sculpted rather than shot, their high contrast recalling relief work or grattage. By contrast, her atmospheric tones a masterclass of control and contour, Ingresque graphite precision.
Looking at Grannan’s models—reclining in fields, bleached hair glinting in the coastal sun—I thought unexpectedly of the Pre-Raphaelites. Their lush stillness, their self-conscious languor, recalls Edward Burne-Jones’s ruddy sylphs, themselves a rebellion against the industrial strictures of Victorian England. By that analogy, Hujar plays the Courbet to Grannan’s Burne-Jones: earthy realism versus green anarcho-crust reverie. Both, however, work within tradition only to subvert it. Hujar pushed the classical studio portrait into underground theatrics; redwood nymphs of Grannan fracture the fantasy of California as a land of easy transcendence: it is, and it isn’t. Violence always lurks in these outlaw woods.
For all their stylistic contrasts, a whiff of utopia hovers through both artist’s subjects—from anonymous internet casting to fellow artists, drag performers, lovers—who sought refuge in a city within a country that denied them recognition, insisting on visibility in the dark of an epidemic. The Humboldt people that Grannan depicts likewise embody a desire to step outside the mainstream’s demands: to vanish into the fog, surviving by one’s own code.
Yet utopia, these photographs remind us, is precarious, maybe doomed. Hujar’s New York was stalked by a government that met the AIDS crisis with lethal indifference. Today, some of Grannan’s gender-nonconforming folks face renewed assaults on their rights by a retrograde administration hell-bent on reanimating the reactionary policies of the Reagan years. Nearly forty years separate the two projects, but their implicit message is constant: to be seen is to exist.
One is tempted, in discussing such work, to retreat into purely formal terms—shadows, tonalities, the sculptural curve of a cheekbone—especially when the subjects themselves have long been reduced to stereotypes or statistics. But form here is inseparable from politics: the choice of light, the angle of a gaze, the inclusion of an animal companion all speaks to the dire stakes. Peter Hujar and Katy Grannan together remind us that photography, at its most searching, is a kind of covenant between artist, subject and audience, past and present, conception and reception, imprint and erasure.
Together at Fraenkel, their photographs thunder as an elegiac dialogue across time: two distinct visions of the margins that refuse to relegate those who inhabit them to the shadows. Pace Roland Barthes, death is implicit in the photograph. So too is light.
Ted Barrow, PhD, is an art historian who works as a lecturer, writer, and curator in San Francisco. In addition to publishing regularly about art, Barrow hosts a show called "This Old Ledge," that explores the history of the built environment of skateboarding.
KATY GRANNAN "Adam, Arcata, CA", 2025. © Katy Grannan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
KATY GRANNAN "Damla, Arcata, CA", 2025. © Katy Grannan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
KATY GRANNAN "Damla, Mad River, CA", 2025. © Katy Grannan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
PETER HUJAR "David Wojnarowicz Manhattan Night (III)", 1981. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York.
PETER HUJAR "Fanny", 1978. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York.