Peter Hujar

Commercial Photography — Portraiture Shaped in the Darkroom

Peter Hujar was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934. He spent his early childhood with his Ukrainian grandparents and later studied photography in New York. Working as an assistant in commercial studios during the 1950s, he learned lighting and enlarging techniques. The Ukrainian Museum's 2024 exhibition Rialto traced how those skills informed his later portraits, beginning with his early photographs.^*2

Even after leaving commercial photography, Hujar continued to make his final decisions in the darkroom. More than 5,700 contact sheets held by the Morgan Library & Museum preserve evidence of that process. Some date to 1955 and bear pencil marks identifying particular frames. The 2026 exhibition Hujar:Contact placed sequences of shifting poses alongside the photographs he ultimately selected.^{*3 Comparing marked frames with adjacent exposures reveals the distinction between experimenting during a sitting and choosing the image to print.*14}

The East Village — Photographing a Community From Within

Hujar met the artist Paul Thek in Florida in 1956, beginning a relationship that encompassed both love and artmaking. Andrew Durbin's 2026 joint biography situates their lives within a circle of New York artists, writers, and performers.^{*20 Their personal and artistic history helps explain the years of familiarity that could precede a photograph of someone close to Hujar.}

After the 1969 Stonewall uprising, queer communities and experimental artists downtown developed outlets beyond commercial publications and established galleries. Hujar photographed dancers, drag performers, and writers, often in private rooms. The decision about which expression would survive as a print was made later in the darkroom.^{*4 Disputes over exhibiting and selling his work also shaped how far the photographs circulated during his lifetime.*1}

David Wojnarowicz — Pose, Gaze, and Selection

In David Wojnarowicz (1981), the shadow across the sitter's face and the slight tilt of his shoulders sharpen the force of his gaze into the camera. Wojnarowicz's politically charged work during the AIDS crisis would emerge later. The portrait preserves his face and bearing in 1981, before those subsequent activities came to define how he was seen.^*8

The Whitney Museum likewise draws attention to the meeting of photographer and sitter in this portrait.^{*10 Holding a pose and returning the camera's gaze involve both the photographer's direction and the sitter's will. Their exchange gives the portrait its tension. Other frames on the contact sheets, viewed alongside the finished print, distinguish the sitter's movements from Hujar's eventual choice of image.*23 The direct gaze belongs to the person photographed; the shadows on the face and the contour of the shoulders also bear the marks of exposure and darkroom work. Recalling his friendship with Hujar, critic Vince Aletti described becoming attentive to photographs as physical objects, with particular dimensions, paper, and tonal range.*22 That attention to the material print makes its production integral to an account of the portrait.}

Animals and Empty Streets — The Reach of Portraiture

Hujar's scrutiny of a sitter's pose extended to the folds of a dog's skin and the outlines of an empty street. In Will: Shar-Pei (I) (1985), the animal's wrinkles and distribution of weight offer clues comparable to a human expression. In New York Series #22 (1976), he gives a deserted street the sustained attention of a portrait.^{*9 The folds in Will's skin and the lines of buildings in New York Series #22 each organize the image around the shape of a subject without relying on a human face.*5}

Portraits in Life and Death — The Living and the Dead in Two Parts

Hujar's 1976 book Portraits in Life and Death opens with 29 portraits of living people, followed by 11 photographs of remains in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. After Susan Sontag's introduction, the first section presents named friends and artists in individual poses. Turning the pages to the 11 bodies brings their faces and clothing into relation with the living subjects who came before them: these bodies, too, once belonged to individual lives.^{*15 The decision to place two bodies of work, made more than a decade apart in different locations, in a sequence of life and death belongs to the book's editing.}

Hujar visited the Palermo catacombs while traveling in Sicily with Thek in 1963. The experience remained important to both artists. Thek began his Technological Reliquaries the following year, displaying wax forms suggestive of human flesh inside cases.^{*21 More than a decade later, Hujar returned to the catacomb photographs by placing them in the second half of his book.*24 Where Thek constructed physical objects in wax, Hujar reconsidered existing photographic images, allowing their order on the page to alter how they were seen. That distinction in media separates their responses to the same experience.*24 The 1963 encounter took form in Thek's sculptural vitrines and, later, in the 11 photographs closing Hujar's book.}

Hujar said that he arranged a photobook as one might construct a novel. He reportedly excluded Andy Warhol in favor of a lesser-known dancer.^{*16 The choice put the sequence's demands ahead of public fame. The passage from 29 living faces to 11 dead bodies likewise draws attention to the limits of each individual life. Sales were poor when the book appeared in 1976, but its 2024 reissue and subsequent exhibitions renewed attention to it. That gap in reception shows how the same photographs may acquire different meanings as their audience and historical setting change.*22}

Newspaper — Independent Publishing and the Sequence of Images

The large-format independent publication Newspaper (1968–71) was led by Steve Lawrence, who built its pages largely around photographs by Hujar and other contributors. Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol also appeared in its issues. Pictures followed one another with little explanatory text. Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez has documented the publication's 14 issues and Hujar's contribution of 44 photographs.^*17

Portraits in Life and Death follows a two-part sequence shaped by one photographer. Newspaper, by contrast, allows images by different makers to meet in unexpected combinations. In a 1969 issue, a sequence of portraits of Tuli Kupferberg appears among pictures by other contributors, carrying the repeated image of one person into the rhythm of the whole publication.^{*19 Across its 14 issues, Newspaper provided an outlet for photographs that could circulate before entering a gallery. For his 1986 Gracie Mansion exhibition, Hujar arranged 70 prints in two rows, extending his decisions about selection and juxtaposition onto the gallery wall.*18 Such outlets mattered when access to exhibition spaces depended on the judgment of dealers and galleries. A publication could be held and read as a succession of images by several artists, unlike a fixed grouping of prints on a wall.*13}

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed — A Star's Pose in a Hospital Bed

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed (1973) depicts the transgender actress associated with Andy Warhol's circle posing in a hospital bed. Candy Darling places one arm behind her head and turns her face toward the lens. The white bedding and flowers beside her pillow frame the gesture almost like a scene from a film. She maintains a performer's pose even in a hospital room.^{*7 The photograph dates from 1973, as the gay liberation movement was gaining ground, before the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Darling's illness and death cannot be directly attributed to that later epidemic. Reading the photograph as an image of the AIDS crisis would confuse her own medical circumstances with the star persona she chose to present.*6}

Arbus and Mapplethorpe — Different Relations to the Sitter

Like Hujar, Diane Arbus photographed New Yorkers who were often treated as outsiders to social norms. Arbus preserved the tension of encounters with her subjects, while Hujar also worked over many years with people he knew closely, among them Paul Thek. They met in 1956 and traveled to Sicily together in 1963; Hujar's portraits of Thek therefore also raise the question of how to photograph someone with whom one has shared both intimacy and creative work.^*5

Mapplethorpe's photographs of male nudes rely on precisely constructed lighting and poses. Hujar could allow irritation, fatigue, and awkwardness to remain in a portrait.^{*16 Durbin's 2026 joint biography traces the friendship, romance, rivalry, and eventual separation of Hujar and Thek.*20 When portraits born of such relationships entered the 1976 book or the 1986 Gracie Mansion exhibition, private memories became available to people who had never known the sitters. The book's readers encountered them page by page; visitors encountered them through the exhibition's arrangement.}

Hujar:Contact — Looking Beyond the Finished Print

After Hujar died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987, Wojnarowicz photographed his head, hands, and feet. A body Hujar had photographed while alive became, after his death, the subject of a friend's images of mourning and protest.^{*11 Hujar had relatively few opportunities to show his photographs while living. His distance from the art market and reliance on independent outlets constrained their circulation.*1}

Recent scholarship has approached Hujar's photographs of the downtown art world through the circumstances of their making and editing. The 2023 reissue of Newspaper and the 2025 reconstruction of his Gracie Mansion exhibition preceded a 2026 show of contact sheets, each offering a different way to examine selection and sequencing.^{*18 At the Morgan Library & Museum, more than 110 contact sheets were displayed alongside 20 enlargements, making it possible to trace changes in pose and the frames Hujar chose to print.*3 Sequences of exposures, once largely absent from public accounts of his work, have become part of its historical study.}

Biographies and films have also contributed to the reassessment. Linda Rosenkrantz's account of December 18, 1974, drawn from an interview with Hujar, mingles conversations with friends and worries about work and income.^{*12 It records portrait commissions and darkroom labor alongside anxiety about rent and earnings. His relationships with artists who would appear in the 1976 book were embedded in the ordinary demands of work and daily life.*23 Photographing Allen Ginsberg and corresponding with Sontag figure in the same day's account.*23 Read alongside the later retrospectives, that day reveals the labor and financial uncertainty behind the artist whose work museums now celebrate.}