Author Stephen Koch, longtime champion of photographer Peter Hujar, dies at 84
His death was announced by the Peter Hujar Archive in a statement on social media. No cause of death was disclosed.
People
The author Stephen Koch, a longtime champion of photographer Peter Hujar who served as executor of his estate, has died. He was 84.
His death was announced by the Peter Hujar Archive in a statement on social media. No cause of death was disclosed.
Peter Hujar was a New York photographer known for his intimate black-and-white portraits of artists and downtown figures in the 1960s through the 1980s. His 1973 image Candy Darling on Her Deathbed became one of the defining photographs of its era.
Though he received limited recognition during his lifetime, Hujar, who died in 1987 of AIDS-related complications, is now considered a major figure in late 20th-century American photography.
Koch and Hujar were close friends in New York’s downtown art world in the 1970s and 1980s. Koch was one of Hujar’s most trusted confidants and wrote the text for Hujar’s 1986 book Portraits in Life and Death.
Before Hujar’s death in 1987, Koch was named executor of his estate and spent decades overseeing the archive, working with galleries, museums and publishers to promote Hujar’s legacy.
“We’re so grateful for the work he’s done all these years, with his unwavering persistence. His long career as the executor of Peter Hujar’s estate coincided with his longer careers as an author, of fiction and nonfiction, a historian and a teacher,” the archive said in its statement.
“Stephen along with his personality, presence and guidance will be deeply missed.”
Over the course of his career, Koch wrote extensively about the intersection of art and politics in the 20th century, with books and articles that spanned fiction, cultural history and criticism. He was also a longtime educator, teaching writing at universities including Princeton and Columbia.
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His writing included the 1971 book Stargazer on the films of Andy Warhol, as well as Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals and The Breaking Point, about Ernest Hemingway and his friendship with John Dos Passos.
“A close associate of Susan Sontag, he shared with her a commitment to rigorous cultural criticism and an insistence on the moral seriousness of art,” Fraenkel Gallery said in a statement.
“As a teacher of writing at Columbia and Princeton University, he shaped generations of students with the same intellectual discipline that characterized his prose.”
The Peter Hujar Archive joined the gallery Ortuzar in January, the gallery announced, moving from the mega-gallery Pace.
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