“Hujar:Contact” at the Morgan Library Looks Through the Lens of an Artist Ahead of His Time
Downtown New York denizens, queer icons, outsiders, decay, and urban grime are all observed with sharp-eyed soul at a contact sheet-based retrospective
Peter Hujar, whose archive and contact sheets are the subject of a new exhibition at the Morgan Library, was the classic story of an artist rising to acclaim posthumously. The Morgan, which acquired Hujar’s materials in 2013, has arranged a selection of those contact sheets from the 1950s through the years before his death from AIDS in 1987. The Library thoughtfully provides a rack of magnifying glasses to better view the details on the contact sheets. There is a feel, in the Morgan’s compact second-floor galleries, of being in a retrospective in miniature, which is partly the nature of the contact sheets: they are full of good shots themselves, so each one becomes a tiny wall gallery of its own.
For the first year after arriving in New York as a young as a young man, Hujar kept busy day jobs as a photography assistant and later in advertising. As the photos in the exhibit move into the ’60s, a certain thought may begin to occur in the mind of the viewer, “Wait, did this guy know everybody?” Hujar circled in the orbit of the Warhol Factory without being sucked into it, and the Factory denizens who stand out here are the ones who really had things to say independent of Andy, in particular Jackie Curtis. Warhol superstar aficionados will also appreciate the contact sheet of Candy Darling on her deathbed at Cabrini Hospital in 1973.
Peter Hujar lived on the edge of society and the centre of queer liberation subculture in a time when closet doors were still locked with fear. He photographed two men in leather kissing when homosexuality was not yet decriminalized in New York. There is a contact sheet of Stonewall icon Marsha P. Johnson, who now has a park along the East River Williamsburg waterfront named after her. Hujar did not actually photograph the Stonewall riots despite being present for them, but he did shoot the recruitment poster for the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) the following year.
In 1973, Hujar shut down his more commercial magazine work to lean into artistic photography, and was often 20 years older than the downtown denizens he captured on film. Hujar continued to shoot portraits, but part of his style of portraiture was to regard the entire body, not just the face, as a part of the person being photographed and just as worthy of individualization.
The monograph Portraits in Life and Death, Hujar’s magnum opus, was his central focus in the mid-70s. The book was not a success upon its initial publication, and the artist responded by looking inward. He continued to photograph people incisively, but the later period includes images of urban darkness, nature, animals and trashscapes captured with the same reverence he gave to Susan Sontag.
A note on Hujar’s posthumous success: Portraits in Life and Death is currently in print as of 2026, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book form, and ready for check-out from the New York Public Library. This is certainly not the case for the majority of artistic photography monographs half a century after their release. It would be an oversimplification that Hujar chose or prophesied that he would exemplify the artist who is obscure in life and revered after death. His contact sheets are full of shockingly young versions of faces that wouldn’t cement themselves in the mainstream public mind until they had a bit more mileage on them; look at the contact sheet of baby John Waters, for example. Hujar shot people who were already famous, and in some cases made an artistic decision not to use their portraits in his book—Andy Warhol being one such case.
The gist of the matter is that other brilliantly talented people recognized that talent in Hujar, and gave him their time. Open pages from his job books show a crop of names contemporaneously established, or on their way to it, who sat for Hujar: Bonnie Raitt, Diana Vreeland, Roberto Rossellini, Lauren Hutton, Fran Lebowitz, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and William S. Burroughs to name a few. Game recognized game. It just took a while for the public to catch up.
Hujar:Contact (2026) by Joel Smith is published by MACK and The Morgan Library & Museum. Hujar:Contact is at The Morgan Library & Museum from May 22 to October 25, 2026.