Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar studied at High School of Art and Design. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is photography. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait, nude, landscape and animal. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Work by Peter Hujar is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Tate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Modern Art.

• Name — Peter Hujar • Born — October 11, 1934 • Birthplace — Trenton, New Jersey, U.S. • Died — 26 November 1987 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Resting Place — Gate of Heaven Cemetery • Known for — Black & white portrait photography • Website — peterhujararchive.com

Hujar was born on October 11, 1934, in Trenton, New Jersey, to Rose Murphy, a waitress, who was abandoned by her husband during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents on their farm. He remained on the farm until his grandmother's death in 1946, and his mother took him to New York City to live with her and her second husband in their one-room apartment. The household was abusive, and in 1950, when Hujar was 16, he left home and began to live independently.

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.

In 1958, Hujar accompanied the artist Joseph Raffael on the latter's Fulbright scholarship 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 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.

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. 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." Hujar's portraits, the subject of the first half of the one book he published while he was alive, are simple; he almost never used props and the focus of his work was on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot. Usually, his subjects either were sitting or posing in a recumbent way.

This list follows the comprehensive compilation of the exhibitions of Hujar's work until 2017 provided by Joel Smith in the Mapfre/Aperture monograph Speed of Life. All solo exhibitions in his lifetime are named here, while most group shows were omitted. • 1974: as part of Recent Acquisitions, Floating Foundation of Photography, New York • 1975: Portfolio by Peter Hujar, Foto Gallery, New York (alongside Christopher Makos: Pictures from a Suitcase) • 1977: Catskill Center for Photography, Woodstock, New York • 1978: Peter Hujar: Photographs, Port Washington Public Library, New York • 1979: Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery, New York • 1980: La Remise du Parc, Paris, Franc • 1980: Tiroler Landesmuseen, Innsbruck • Museum Moderner Kunst Wien • 1981: Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, Robert Samuel Gallery, New York • 1982: Larry Clark / Peter Hujar, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (catalogue), expanded to • Peter Hujar / Larry Clark / Robert Mapplethorpe, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland • 1982: Galerie Jurka, Amsterdam, the Netherlands • 1982: Galerie Nagel, Berlin, Germany • 1983: Forum Stadtpark, Graz, and Modern Art Galerie, Vienna, Austria • 1986: Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York

• Illustration — Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death, organized by The Ukrainian Museum, NY as collateral exhibition of Venice Biennale 2024 After his death several commercial galleries showed his work in (solo) exhibitions, like James Danziger (1991, 1992, 1998), Paula Cooper (1993, 2002), Wessel and O'Connor (1998), all situated in New York, Stephen Daiter in Chicago, Yezerski in Boston, and Berinson in Berlin (all three in 1999), Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels (1996), Renée Ziegler (1990) and Mai 36 (2002, 2010) in Zurich, and Maureen Paley and Marietta Neuss in London (both 2008). Closely engaged with the Peter Hujar Archive since the 2000s and regularly arranging shows of Hujar's work are Matthew Marks (first in 2000) and Pace/MacGill (since 2013) in New York, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (since 2002), and Maureen Paley in London (since 2008). Listed here are just the gallery shows which were accompanied by a catalogue, in addition to all solo shows in public institutions. • 1989: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York, and • Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada • 1994: Peter Hujar: A Retrospective, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands, and • Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland • in 1995 as Peter Hujar. A Charm in Life and Death, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany • 1996: Peter Hujar: Das photographische Werk, DAAD-Galerie, Berlin, Germany (no catalogue) • 1999: Peter Hujar: Intimate Survey, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois • 2005: Peter Hujar – Night, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, and • Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco • Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston • Scalo Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland • 2005: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York • 2007: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London • 2008: Paul P. / When Ghost Meets Ghost / Peter Hujar, Maureen Paley Gallery, London, UK • 2009: Peter Hujar: Photographs 1956–1958, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York • 2010: Peter Hujar: Thek's Studio 1967, Alexander von Bonin, New York, and • Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland • Maureen Paley Gallery, London • 2014: Peter Hujar: Love & Lust, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, California • 2017–2019: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, Mapfre, Barcelona, Spain; traveled to • Fotomuseum Den Hague, The Netherlands • Morgan Library & Museum, New York • Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California • Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio • Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France • 2020: Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin • 2022: Peter Hujar curated by Elton John, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco • 2023: Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois • 2024: Peter Hujar: Rialto, Ukrainian Museum, New York • 2024: Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death, Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice, Italy, on th occasion of the 60. Venice Biennale • 2025: Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark, Raven Row, London, 30 January – 6 April 2025. • 2026: Hujar:Contact, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 22 May – 25 October

Hujar's work is held in the following collections (a. o.): USA • New York • Brooklyn Museum • Morgan Library & Museum • Metropolitan Museum of Art • Museum of Modern Art • Whitney Museum of American Art • Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois • Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas • Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas • Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri • Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota • Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut UK and Europe • Folkwang Museum Essen, Germany • Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland • Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland • Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands • Tate Modern, London, UK: 10 prints (as of May 2021)