The raw, fledgling intimacy of Peter Hujar’s contact sheets

Less than a year after Peter Hujar (1934 – 1987) learned he had AIDS, the photographer passed from the disease at the age of 53. In death, Hujar reemerged as one of the great visionaries of his generation, possessed with a devotion to art that remained beyond his years on Earth. Unlike his contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe, who used notoriety to incendiary effect, Hujar preferred the slow burn of simple truths.

In his life, Hujar would produce just one book, Portraits in Life and Death, a sequence of just 41 photographs published in 1976. Few took notice, except those who saw Hujar from their extraordinary vantage point as his subjects. Half a century later, his intimate photographs of friends and lovers at the frontlines of New York’s radical underground including William S. Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, Susan Sontag, John Waters, and Divine have become the standard bearer of contemporary portraiture. Hujar weaves images made in the Catacombs of Palermo throughout a book, a memento mori that takes on chilling effect as many pictured would succumb to AIDS. 

With the passage of time, the art world would discover what Hujar had always known: the camera was merely an instrument, no different than the pencil, paintbrush, or chisel. Although the hand of the artist has largely been overlooked in photography, the new exhibition and catalogue, Hujar: Contact, crafts a compelling case for the contact sheet as sketchbook, revealing the process in which the masterpiece emerges. More literally, Hujar marked the contact sheets with a red wax pencil, discreetly identifying those he wanted to print, leaving 5,783 photographs unseen until this moment. 

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Curated by Joel Smith, who previously staged Peter Hujar: Speed of Life at the Morgan Library & Museum in 2018, Hujar: Contact is a passport into the past, inviting us to the world through the eyes of an artist devoted to the craft. ​“The contact sheet is the thing that endures. It is the seed that you planted,” says Smith. ​“As a photographer, you’re left with the material trace of what you did, and it might be the next evening or it might be years later that you make good on that and print something from that roll.” 

Where Henri Cartier-Bresson was seeking ​“the decisive moment,” Hujar was more often tasked with having to discern which of so many decisive moments was the story he wanted to tell. Consider his 1973 photograph of Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, a spellbinding portrait of the Warhol Superstar cast in the role of a lifetime. It is glamorous, enchanting, poignant, and heartbreaking in equal part, casting the viewer in a hypnotic reverie of what was and could never be. Cut to the contact sheet, and Candy Darling is cutting up with Jackie Curtis and Hujar, playing the part like Joan Crawford accepting Anne Bancroft’s Academy Award from her bed. 

Reading the contact sheets, one imagines Hujar as the filmmaker he dreamed of becoming in his youth. The sheets unfold like screen tests, the camera tracing the unspoken narratives. ​“Hujar wanted to make a picture about a whole person,” Smith says. ​“Cinematically, you can do that by telling a story and characterising the person by the things that happen and what they do about it. You get a much more concise version from the contact sheets, but it’s the same family of storytelling.” 

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But the story Hujar wanted to tell? Therein lies the rub, the delicate frisson that underlies the luminous silver of his photographs. ​“He was somebody who thought a lot about what a person is like and how they are liable to act in front of the camera,” Smith says. ​“The medium he worked in, in a sense, was provocation.” 

Hujar: Contact is on on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, through October 25, 2026. The catalogue is published by MACK/​Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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