02 works, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Candy Darling, with Footnotes. #141

Peter Hujar (American, 1934–1987)

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, c. 1973

Gelatin silver print

37.15 x 35.56 cm. (14.6 x 14 in.)

Private collection

Candy Darling - 1944 - 1974 was born into an alcoholic household in Queens, N.Y. where she lived with her mother after her parents’ divorce. Darling, who was assigned male at birth, spent hours watching and studying old movies on TV.  It was by impersonating her favorite actresses that she discovered herself. With milky white skin and large brown eyes she was indeed a beauty. 

She began getting hormone injections and frequenting Manhattan gay bars. By 1967, she had assumed the name Candy Darling and was starring alongside Jackie Curtis and a young Robert DeNiro in Curtis’ play ‘Glamour, Glory, and Gold’. One night Andy Warhol came to see the production and promptly cast her and Curtis in his film ‘Flesh’ (1968).

Though she found at best bit-parts in mainstream films. She portrayed a central character in Warhol’s ‘Women in Revolt’ (1971) and appeared in such independent films as ‘Brand X’ (1970) and ‘Some of My Best Friends Are...’ (1971), where she played a victim of trans-bashing.  Darling was immortalized in music by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground in the rock classics ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Candy Says,’ and in the Rolling Stones’ ‘Citadel.’ 

She died of lymphoma on March 21, 1974 at the age of 29. Despite the brevity of her life, her influence remains undeniable.  More on Candy Darling

Peter Hujar (American, 1934–1987) was an influential American photographer. He worked in black-and-white portraiture, often portraying his friends and acquaintances in an intimate or sexually suggestive settings. “His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way,” the photographer Nan Goldin once wrote. His photographs of animals have that same rare empathy, they are like highly personal portraits.” 

Born on October 11, 1934 in Trenton, NJ, Hujar struggled through a difficult childhood marked by abandonment, and went on to work in the field of commercial photography before joining the burgeoning downtown art scene in New York. Making contact with Andy Warhol and befriending several important art world figures like Susan Sontag, Candy Darling, and his partner David Wojnarowicz, Hujar created a seminal body of work throughout the 1970s and 80s. Portraits in Life and Death is his best-known book of prints, combining photographs of his friends with those taken during a Fulbright grant trip documenting the dead in the Palermo catacombs of southern Italy. Death was consistently a theme in Hujar's work, a subject he explored until his death from AIDS-related complications on November 26, 1987. More on Peter Hujar

Francesco Scavullo, (American, 1921–2004)

CANDY DARLING , c. 1973

Cibachrome

47.6 x 31.8 cm. (18.7 x 12.5 in.)

Private collection

Francesco Scavullo (January 16, 1921 – January 6, 2004) was an American fashion photographer best known for his work on the covers of Cosmopolitan and his celebrity portraits.

Scavullo developed the concept of the magazine “cover girl,” which celebrated the beauty of women and focused on sexuality and glamour, over the course of a half-century career, more than 30 years of which were spent shooting “Cosmo girl” covers for Cosmopolitan magazine. As an assistant to several world-famous photographers at Vogue, Scavullo developed techniques that would make him one of the most in-demand portrait photographers of his time; he used cloth filters or reflective surfaces with his light source to blur imperfections. Among his subjects were Farrah Fawcett, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Kim Basinger, and Madonna, as well as Brooke Shields in a famous and controversial photo as a child. More on Francesco Scavullo

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