Contact sheet: Peter Hujar self portraits on heel, 1974, gelatin silver print, 8.5 x 11″, 2013.108:8.2110. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013.

Only a decade ago, just mentioning photographer Peter Hujar required explanation. “He took that famous picture of Susan Sontag, recumbent with tired eyes.” Or: “He made gorgeous black-and-white photos of writers, artists, dancers, beautiful men, empty landscapes, and animals.” But today no preamble is necessary. There are countless entry points to Hujar’s extensive oeuvre, many of which appeared in the past year alone: a half-dozen new books; exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco; and most prominently, a biopic, Peter Hujar’s Day, adapted by Ira Sachs from a 1974 interview with Linda Rosenkrantz. 

Another avenue opened with the publication of Andrew Durbin’s indispensable The Wonderful World That Almost Was—a joint biography of Hujar and the artist Paul Thek, Hujar’s lover for a time. Released in April, the book details the facts of Hujar’s life, from his miserable childhood to to his ascendance among an illustrious East Village creative circle. Also his 1987 AIDS diagnosis, and his death, later that year, at age fifty-three. But truly understanding the moody and laconic photographer remains a challenge, certainly for those who never knew him. Unlike Thek, a compulsive diarist and author of vivid, troublingly self-revealing letters, Hujar put little in writing—he wrote few letters and kept no journals beyond the “job books” that logged his photo sessions. Much of what we know has been gathered from anecdotes and aphoristic reflections. Thus, Nan Goldin: “Peter had integrity, and that’s why he didn’t have a big career.” Vince Aletti: “He was the angriest person I’ve ever known.” Sheyla Baykal: “Peter was loved by an enormous amount of people,” and yet “I don’t think he felt very adored.” 

A new exhibition, Hujar:Contact, at the Morgan Library & Museum, vastly enlarges the public’s view of Hujar with the display of more than a hundred and ten of his contact sheets, drawn from an archive of nearly six thousand. Accompanying the show is an even more expansive catalogue, edited for MACK by the curator Joel Smith, which is the fullest exploration yet of the photographer’s idiosyncratic range and sensibility. We see William S. Burroughs, Diana Vreeland, a rumpled and unshaven Joe Brainard looking into the camera with dark, wet eyes. There are ruined factories, dairy cows, choppy black water. Italy is a source of constant preoccupation, and so is sex. The show includes a contact sheet from a session with Bruce de Sainte Croix, though its best known and most scandalous images—magnificent pictures of Sainte Croix masturbating—make no appearance in the exhibition itself, nor in the catalogue. 

The mix will be familiar to those who attended the 2018 Morgan exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, which traveled internationally, introducing new audiences to Hujar’s interests. The most obvious difference in the new show is the curator’s attention to the photographer’s process. Smith dates Hujar’s discovery of the reclining body to the early sixties and his experiments with indirect light—via a soft reflector placed behind the camera, revealing details in a sitter’s face—to a session with an unhoused person called Penny in 1981. With a magnifying glass provided by the museum, the viewer can study Hujar’s annotations, which indicate his favorite shots as well as intentions to crop or organize the pictures. In a spectacular example, he uses a red grease pencil to number a sequence across nine of the proof sheets (only two of which are currently on view). The subjects: a trio of shaggy-haired dancers from Robert Wilson’s experimental Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, executing a seven-part routine. We see each figure (1) sitting at ease; (2) raising a pelvis, extending a leg; then (3) crouching, arms outstretched, entire body tensed; and on and on. 

Contact sheet: Byrds – 7 Movements, 1973, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10″, 2013.108:8.1687. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013.

The chains of sequential images recast Hujar, best known for his portraits, as a specialist in movement and duration. His photos of Wilson’s dancers, initiated after his friend Ann Wilson introduced Hujar to the Byrd Hoffman School, document emerging choreographic styles alongside the eccentricities of a given dancer. Kenneth King is shown performing a pantomime in clownish vaudevillian attire—white gloves, wig, and wire-frame glasses—in Wilson’s Spring Street studio, decorated with strips of torn muslin. The choreographer James Waring appears in a series of twelve exposures, draped in satin and brandishing a gold mask. (Joel Smith describes the two as intimates; Hujar tended to Waring when he was dying of cancer in 1975.) 

Contact sheet: Palermo Catacombs, 1963, gelatin silver print, 3 x 8″, 2013.108:8.5272. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013.

The rarely seen pictures suggest a tendency in Hujar’s work toward artifice, gesture, extravagance—the sort of campy eclecticism that the writer Benjamin Moser claims, in his foreword to the 2024 reprint of Portraits of Life and Death, Hujar rejected in favor of a certain classicism and austerity. King and Waring both appear in Portraits, the only collection Hujar published in his lifetime, and they are minimally adorned, just sitting there, confronting the camera with a rawness and intensity. Hujar’s idea of pairing the portraits with snapshots of deteriorating corpses, taken with Paul Thek at the Capuchin catacombs outside Palermo, casts a morbid shadow over the whole project and onto public perception of Hujar himself. Responsibility lies partially with Sontag’s introduction to the original volume, which argues, sententiously, that photography “converts the world into a cemetery.” Hujar’s portraits, even of the living, exude what she called the “sex appeal of death.” 

Contact sheet: Susan Sontag, 1975, gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 11″, 2013.108:8.2314. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013.

The story that unfolds among the contact sheets is less gloomy, richer, more varied, sometimes quite funny (Hujar at the dentist in a houndstooth sweater). Everywhere there are remnants of a pre-Stonewall aestheticism and allusions to Hollywood glamour. We go backstage at Charles Ludlam’s Camille. Elsewhere Hujar shows us Ethyl Eichelberger as Nefertiti, Jackie Curtis as an unabashed Pierrette. The longest sequences approach cinematic form: across twenty-four frames, taken in 1973, Candy Darling rises in her deathbed, blond wig a pathetic mess, then collapses; Thek, photographed twelve years earlier, purses his baby face and disrobes. Hujar was a lifelong cinephile who haunted New York revival houses and in fact studied filmmaking at Cinecittà for some dissatisfying months in 1964 before returning, decisively, to his medium-format Rolleiflex camera. According to Andrew Durbin, the woman he most wanted to photograph was Greta Garbo.

Knowing how much Hujar loved the movies, it’s impossible not to think of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, in which the sitters idle seductively as the camera softens their skin, darkens their hair, improves, estranges, elicits, glamorizes. Hujar—who, along with Thek, was included in a version of Warhol’s Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys—once said that “all things come from Andy,” and the two lapsed Catholics obviously shared a social and aesthetic universe. In the end, however, comparing them does more to emphasize their considerable differences in style, degrees of rigor, and spiritual self-conception. The screen tests are resonant with Hujar’s portraits, but Warhol’s own photographs diverge sharply. Exhibited at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center in 2018, Warhol’s proof sheets read like autobiography. He brought a camera with him always, to every party, every walk, blasting through a daily roll of thirty-six frames using his Minox point-and-shoot. 

John Zorn, 1986, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14″, 2020.114. Gift of Stephen Koch.

Hujar was of course different, working independently in his Second Avenue loft (the arched windows top what is now Angelika’s Village East cinema), controlling the whole process. An exacting technician, he found ways to bring out the silver tones in his prints, treating the paper with oxidizers, making adjustments even after it dried. The aim was never flawlessness but rather intention, fitting the darkroom process to a given subject, setting, or moment. Hujar’s dictum, per his collaborator (and now the sole printer of his work) Gary Schneider, was simply that “no two prints need to match: they all need to function.” He complained to Linda Rosenkrantz that his failing eyesight diminished his capacities, but also recoiled at mechanical reproductions of his work.

The Morgan contact sheets are dusty, bent, crumpled, scratched, richly artifactual, and thus satisfying from an antiquarian viewpoint. They prove that primary documents are never inert but rather active, alive, disclosing something new each time they are exhumed and studied. The idea gives the Morgan show its own sense of purpose—resurrecting Hujar’s work as Durbin gives life to his world: “When Peter photographed you,” Durbin writes, “he did so not because he saw that you were going to die, but because he saw how much you had lived. He looked backward and into you, as well as forward; he met you where you were.”

Contact sheet: b. Jackie Curtis for New Times, 1970, gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 11″, 2013.108:8.1200. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013.