Exhibit Uncovers the 5,783 Contact Sheets Photographer Peter Hujar Left Behind

An upcoming exhibition will current hundreds of contact sheets and archival supplies to indicate how photographer Peter Hujar developed his work over a number of a long time.

Titled Hujar: Contact, the exhibition will probably be on view at at The Morgan Library & Museum from May 22 by October 25, 2026, and can discover the life, instances, and artistic evolution of Hujar. It will embody greater than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements drawn from the Morgan’s assortment of his work.

In 2013, the Morgan acquired the 5,783 black-and-white contact sheets Hujar had on the time of his demise, together with two notebooks, or “job books,” wherein he recorded photographic assignments and private tasks from 1954 to 1985. Together, these supplies type an in depth report of an artist who left no written reflection on his work however rigorously preserved proof of his photographic follow.

The exhibition presents the contact sheet—historically a working software—as an object for shut research. Each sheet reproduces a full roll of movie, permitting viewers to comply with Hujar’s sequence of exposures. Many embody his handwritten notes and markings, which present how he approached cropping and printing and doc the selections behind remaining photographs.

“Contact sheets reveal an intimate history of Hujar’s habits, inspirations, and happy accidents—the intricacies hidden behind a final print,” says Joel Smith, curator of the exhibition and Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography on the Morgan. “Hujar: Contact illuminates the physical process that was central to his artistic practice.”

The exhibition additionally pairs contact sheets with prints, together with works not beforehand exhibited, to indicate how portraits developed by an ongoing alternate between photographer and topic. Working primarily with a medium-format digicam that allowed him to keep up eye contact along with his sitters, Hujar created situations wherein each events influenced the picture.

Large-scale reproductions of pages from Hujar’s job books will probably be displayed on the gallery partitions, providing a chronological view of his profession. The earliest surviving entry dates to 1954, when he started photographing pals and acquaintances in New York.

A Photographer Who Found Critical Acclaim After Death

Today, Hujar is acknowledged as among the many best American photographers of the late twentieth century. He is greatest identified for his intimate, highly effective, and piercing black-and-white portraits of luminaries of the queer, bohemian artwork scene of downtown Manhattan between the late Nineteen Sixties and the onset of the AIDs plague within the Eighties.

Some of Hujar’s most well-known images embody Orgasmic Man (1969) which turned the duvet of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel A Little Life — in addition to the ultimate portrait of transgender actress and Andy Warhol muse Candy Darling on her deathbed at 29-years-old.

However, Hujar’s work solely acquired marginal recognition throughout his lifetime. It was solely after his demise of AIDS-related pneumonia on the age of fifty-three, that his images started to obtain the essential esteem they deserved.

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Image credit: All photographs courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum.