Peter Hujar

In 1958, Hujar accompanied the artist Joseph Raffael on a Fulbright to Italy. In 1963, he secured his own Fulbright and returned to Italy with Paul Thek, whom he had been dating since 1959, 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 artwork 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.

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.

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.

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 administers it since (today as Peter Hujar Archive). A first retrospective of Hujar’s work in collaboration with the estate was shown two years after his death at the Grey Art Gallery & Study Center of New York University. It was followed by a more comprehensive show in 1994 by a joined effort of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Netherlands) and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2013 the Morgan Library & Museum in New York acquired a hundred prints and the entirety of his written estate and all contact sheets from the Peter Hujar Archive. A collaboration between the Morgan Library and the Spanish Mapfre Foundation enabled a major travelling retrospective exhibition that was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph published in conjunction with Aperture in 2017.