Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar (; October 11, 1934 – November 26, 1987) was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits. Hujar's work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime,

Education Hujar received his first camera in 1947 and in 1953 entered the School of Industrial Art where he expressed interest in being a photographer. He encountered an encouraging teacher, the poet Daisy Aldan (1923–2001), and following her advice he became a commercial photography apprentice. Apart from classes in photography during high school, Hujar's photographic education and technical mastery was acquired in commercial photo studios, where he could use the darkroom during afterhours. By 1957, when he was age 23 he was making photographs now considered to be of museum quality. Early in 1967, he was one of a select group of young photographers in a master class taught by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, where he met Alexey Brodovitch and Diane Arbus. where they explored and photographed the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, images of the dead later featured in Portraits in Life and Death.

In 1964, Hujar returned to America and became a chief assistant in the studio of the commercial photographer Harold Krieger. Around this time, he met Andy Warhol, posed for four of Warhol's three-minute Screen Tests and was included in the compilation film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys that was assembled from Screen Tests.

Hujar quit his job in commercial photography in 1967, and at great financial sacrifice, began to pursue primarily his own art work that reflected his homosexual milieu. He was an influential artist-activist of the gay liberation movement; in 1969, with his lover, the political activist Jim Fouratt, he witnessed the Stonewall riots in the West Village. At the urging of Fouratt, he documented the first gay liberation march (June 28, 1970), and took the now somewhat ironic photo "Come out!!" for the Gay Liberation Front. After their break-up at the end of the year, he had to move into his studio (on 10 East 23rd St) until mid-1972, and in the spring of 1973 he moved into a loft formerly occupied by Jackie Curtis above the Eden Theater in the East Village. Hujar transformed the space in such a way that he could live and work there for the rest of his life.

Portraits in Life and Death At the end of 1974, Hujar had an exhibition at the Foto Gallery on 492 Broome St, alongside pictures by Christopher Makos, where he didn't sell any of his work, but according to a friend gained a book contract with Da Capo Press. In the following months, he took many portraits to include in the book. Besides his friends like Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and Vince Aletti, he portrayed artists like John Waters, drag queen actor Divine and writer William S. Burroughs. In the final book published in 1976, the portraits were juxtaposed by a selection of the pictures he took of the corpses in the Catacombs of Palermo in 1963. Susan Sontag (in a hospital at the time) wrote an introduction for the sequence of 41 images of Portraits in Life and Death. The book got a tepid reception, and only later became a classic in American photography; it was reissued in 2024.

The 1980s In early 1981, Hujar met the young artist David Wojnarowicz, and after a brief period as Hujar's lover, Wojnarowicz became a protégé linked to Hujar for the remainder of the photographer's life. Hujar remained instrumental in all phases of Wojnarowicz's emergence as an important young artist.

Another artist closely linked with Hujar is Robert Mapplethorpe. Both artists were gay white men who excelled at portrait photography and who made unashamedly homoerotic work that walked the line between pornography and fine art, but they were structural opposites. If Mapplethorpe reduced his subjects to abstract forms, his sitter's faces to masks, his nude models to sculptures, then Hujar emphasized his sitters' idiosyncrasies, their irreducible qualities, their human sentience over their fleshy geometry. "Orgasmic Man", one of Hujar's more memorable works, is also a key difference between his work and Mapplethorpe's; never once, in all of Mapplethorpe's editioned photographs, did he show orgasm or ejaculation nor did he depict the concomitant facial expressions.

Hujar had a wide array of subjects in his photography, including cityscapes and urban still lifes, animals, nudes, abandoned buildings, and European ruins. His photography, which was mostly in black and white, has been described as conveying an intimacy, suggestive of both love and loss. One aspect of this intimate quality was Hujar's ability to connect with his sitters. One of his models was quoted after an unsuccessful session as saying:

"We couldn't 'reveal.' As an actor you have to reveal. And Hujar's big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn't know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are...You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone. That's what Peter wanted and that was his great, great talent and skill."

Death and legacy In January 1987, Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS. He died 10 months later, aged 53, on November 25 at Cabrini Medical Center in New York. His funeral was held at Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, and he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

Hujar willed his estate to his lifelong friend Stephen Koch, who administered it until his death in February 2026. The film is a cinematic rendition of Linda Rosenkrantz's book of the same name, which documented a single day in Hujar's life.

Publications Peter Hujar. Portraits in Life and Death. New York: Da Capo, 1976,. Introduction by Susan Sontag. Reissue: New York: W. W. Norton / Liveright, 2024. Foreword by Benjamin Moser. Peter Weiermair (ed.). Peter Hujar. Innsbruck, Austria: Allerheiligenpresse, 1981. Contributions by Jean-Christophe Ammann and Dieter Hall. Peter Hujar. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University, 1990. Texts by Stephen Koch and Thomas Sokolowski, interviews by Fran Lebowitz and Vince Aletti. Urs Stahel, Hripsimé Visser (eds.). Peter Hujar: A Retrospective. Zurich, Switzerland: Scalo, 1994. Foreword by Urs Stahel, texts by Hripsimé Visser, Max Kozloff, and Stephen Koch; mementos by Jean-Christophe Amann, Nan Goldin, Marvin Heiferman, John Heys, Fran Lebowitz a. o. Klaus Kertess. Peter Hujar: Animals and Nudes. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms, 2002. Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery; Göttingen: Steidl, 2016. Text by Vince Aletti. Peter Hujar – Speed of Life. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre; New York: Aperture, 2017, ; original Spanish edition: A la velocidad de la vida, ; paperback edition in French, 2019. Contributions by Philip Gefter, Joel Smith, Steve Turtell and Martha Scott Burton. Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar – The Shabbiness of Beauty. London: Mack, 2021. Linda Rosencrantz. Peter Hujar's Day, Magic Hour, 2022. Transcription of the chronicle of Hujar's December 19, 1974 as told by him and recorded by Rosencrantz. Introduction by Stephen Koch. Steve Lawrence with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick (eds.). Newspaper. Primary Information, 2023. Facsimile of all 14 issues from 1969 to 1971 in one book. Peter Hujar: Rialto, Rodovid Press 2024. Gary Schneider. Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom. BookCrave (Artbook D.A.P.), 2024.