Stephen Bayard Koch

The American writer Stephen Koch died at home in Manhattan on the 24th of February 2026. He was 84 years old. That he was American was important to him; On his mother's side he descended from French Huguenots and was proud of a direct descendent who was present at the signing of the Declaration. On his father's side there were significant Hungarian labour organizers, who reached America by way of London, but by the time he was born the male line in his father's family were Minnesota lawyers. If being American was important to him, that he was born and brought up in Saint Paul, Minnesota was even more so. Just days before he died, he recounted how as a young child he was walking up the road to his parents' home when he was suddenly struck by the thought that he lived in the best town in the best State in the best country on earth. Though he would become more critical of the United States, this sense of things never really left him. Until the end of his life he bemoaned the weakness of Manhattan winters compared to the predictably intense snows of Minnesota.

It was in Manhattan, however, that his life was made. He studied literature at City College, receiving his degree in 1962, before taking a Masters at Columbia which he completed in 1965. Graduate work was anathema to him though, and he sought to find a place as a working writer in the flamboyant literary scene of mid-1960's New York. He was offered a key to that scene by Susan Sontag when he sent her a review of her novel The Benefactor that he had written and published. She invited him to meet, and as he put it, from then on he was something like Sontag's protégé. They remained close friends until her death in 2004.

It was at Sontag's apartment in the mid-1960's that he would first meet the man who would come to define and dominate his life, the photographer Peter Hujar. Hujar was a friend of Sontag's and at that first meeting he described in novelistic and humorous detail a photo session at Harold Krieger's studio with Jane Mansfield. Koch was beguiled.

As the 1960's collapsed into the 70's, Koch became a significant presence on the downtown circuit and knew many of the key players. He wrote a fascinatingly ambivalent study of Andy Warhol's films and briefly orbited the Factory scene. Further into the 1970's he began teaching creative writing at Columbia where, by all accounts, he was a nourishing and inspirational tutor. He also taught at Princeton, and he was rightly proud of his work as an educator. Through friendships with the great - if saturnine and egoistic - critic Annette Michelson, and the equally brilliant and severe art historian Rosalind Krauss, Koch was offered an editorial role at the most revered art journal of the era, October, he turned it down, recognizing that he didn't have the temperament to work under such strident personalities.

Stephen's own personality was sometimes depressive, sometimes ebullient, he was always open to discussion, always considered, and he was strongly averse to conflict. Though in a way he had absconded from the family firm, he retained a lawyer's mind, something that would be useful when his life changed in 1987.

In January 1986 Peter Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS and on Thanksgiving 1987 he died at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan from complications caused by the disease. In the summer of that year, Hujar had confirmed Stephen as the inheritor and executor of his archive. From then on Stephen's life would be dominated by stewarding Hujar's work to the point where the photographer is now recognized as one of the most important American portraitists in any medium of the second half of the twentieth century. When he died his work was barely known outside of a downtown coterie.

Not long before Hujar's death Koch married Frances Cohen MD, a psychoanalyst. In the 1990's they adopted a daughter, Angelica Madeline Koch. His beloved 'Franny's' death in 2021 left Stephen disassembled, he never recovered. Nonetheless, he remained committed to Hujar's work and its dissemination right up to the end. Hujar's success was the success of Stephen's life. For though he published a number of books to mixed success and was a writer up till the day he died, it was as Peter Hujar's executor that his reputation was made. This was something he recognized, with only mild regret.

Stephen Koch lived a quintessentially mid-century Manhattan life. Asked how he felt about the contemporary iteration of the city he said that it was diminished, "but there's still nowhere I'd rather be on this whole goddamn earth."

By John Douglas Millar

The funeral service and burial will take place on Friday, March 13 at 11 a.m. at the Church of the Heavenly Rest. All who knew Stephen, or who wish to pay their respects, are welcome.