Hujar:Contact
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 22\u2013October 25, 2026
New York<\/p>\n
Some artists cut close to the bone. Biography and myth conspire to leave us with a wondrous and terrifying feeling of recognition. In other words, there are artists in whom we see ourselves, kindred spirits who have, through fate and foresight, understood the way of things as we do. For me, that artist is the late photographer Peter Hujar, and I suspect I am not alone, given the ever-growing fascination with both Hujar and his images. Consider Andrew Durbin\u2019s 2026 dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek and Ira Sachs\u2019s 2025 film Peter Hujar\u2019s Day. But photography, like reverence, is a wily thing\u2014the one born from fact and clothed in fiction, the other born from fiction and clothed in fact. Susan Sontag\u2014good friend, occasional subject, and intellectual force in Hujar\u2019s life\u2014put it best: photographs \u201care inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such is the case with Hujar:Contact, an exhibition of more than 110 contact sheets\u2014drawn from an archive of 5,783 sheets, a dizzying feat by show curator Joel Smith\u2014and twenty enlargements, spanning the years 1954 to 1985. Smith\u2019s chronological framing is perhaps the show\u2019s most straightforward curatorial conceit, lending it something of a forensic-meets-all-knowing sensibility. And yet, the mapping of dates, the grafting of timelines onto technical developments, the binding of this moment to that place, all do little to dispel the aura that surrounds Hujar or the totemic charge invested in his images.<\/p>\n
Without question, Smith\u2019s formal analysis\u2014paired with Olivia McCall\u2019s heroic decipherment of Hujar\u2019s cryptic \u201cjob books\u201d\u2014will be of great value to Hujar scholars. But what is also made manifest is the hand of fate and chance in Hujar\u2019s life. The precision of Smith\u2019s feat and the granular depth the contact sheets afford only sharpen how singular the events and figures Hujar captured were. Hujar\u2019s New York, his circle of friends and subjects, asserts a mythical influence on culture to this day. After all, what\u2019s not to marvel at: Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Marsha P. Johnson. All the great queer patron saints are there. Retrospection, however, is the twin of prophecy: both lay claim to a future that has not yet arrived. An exhibition led by the one reads as an act of the other. Is this a bad thing? Not if the promise of daring beauty and brilliance, even when haunted by death\u2019s specter, is what you seek.<\/p>\n
Thus, in the sequence of images Hujar made on his 1963 trip to the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo\u2014his second trip to Italy, with his then-lover, the painter Paul Thek\u2014we see the eleven images from the series Hujar would later use to close his only monograph, Portraits in Life and Death (1976). In another contact sheet, Canal Street Pier with David Wojnarowicz (1983), we follow Hujar during his forays into the crumbling Canal Street Pier, his one-time lover and lifelong collaborator David Wojnarowicz appearing in one frame next to a graffito cow, in another, behind a cloudy pane of glass. There\u2019s a mortal circularity to Hujar photographing Wojnarowicz; too soon it would be Wojnarowicz photographing Hujar\u2019s lifeless visage shortly after his death from AIDS-related complications in 1987. Death stalks Hujar\u2019s images, for him and for us. Speaking of: included in the show are the contact sheets behind one of Hujar\u2019s most iconic images\u2014Candy Darling in her hospital bed at Cabrini Health Care Center, bodega flowers in vases everywhere (1973). I\u2019ve always loved this picture: Darling\u2019s languid pose, that platinum hair, her flawless lip. It\u2019s a Horst P. Horst glamour portrait, staged on a deathbed. The shoot\u2019s contact sheets are a revelation, not because they reveal how staged the image was\u2014Superstar Darling was too schooled in Andy Warhol\u2019s ways of self-fashioning for it to be anything else\u2014but because they convey Darling\u2019s singular vision of beauty and grace. Her death was going to be a final performance of divine flawlessness. John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet of body and soul who spent his life preoccupied by thoughts of mortality and heaven, staged his death portrait as he lay stricken in his final days. \u201cMighty and dreadful,\u201d Donne rebuked death: \u201cthou art not so.\u201d Death shadows Hujar\u2019s subjects\u2014Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Hujar himself, all from AIDS-related complications\u2014but there are also fearlessness and vitality and curiosity in the lives that were lived before their ends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hujar:Contact The Morgan Library & MuseumMay 22\u2013October 25, 2026New York Some artists cut close to the bone. Biography…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}