5,783 contact sheets spanning Peter Hujar’s photographic life are saved in eight banker bins. Each sheet is encased in a plastic pockets, separated, and sorted vertically like paperwork in a submitting cupboard. There is nothing particularly exceptional about these prosaic bins: colourless, useful, quietly banal. They may simply be handed over and not using a second look. Yet inside, they maintain a whole world. On the event of Hujar: Contact, a brand new e-book revealed by Mack alongside an exhibition of the identical title at The Morgan Library and Museum, curator Joel Smith and archivist Olivia McCall communicate to each the creative and private intimacy of Hujar’s contact sheets.
“Today’s audience for photography, and tomorrow’s, doesn’t necessarily understand the relevance of the contact sheet,” contends Smith. “There is no comparable object in the regime of digital photographic practice.” McCall agrees there may be simply “nothing that supersedes the intimacy of the contact sheets themselves”.
A contact sheet is created by putting strips of damaging movie instantly onto photosensitive paper. The negatives are uncovered to gentle to supply a print that enables a number of exposures from a roll of movie to be seen directly. As pictures shifted within the early twentieth century from particular person plates to movie rolls, contact sheets turned an intermediate software for choosing which negatives to enlarge. Smith describes them as a type of internet that “traps the creative process of the artist between the exposure phase and the editing, thinking and printing”. The celluloid thumbnails supply each an indexical abstract of what has handed earlier than the digicam’s lens and a preview of the printed pictures. They are principally objects of documentation, but with out “the hesitancy of a script writer’s first drafts or the irresolution of a painter’s first sketch,” Smith displays within the catalogue textual content. Each body captures the second of first publicity, full with all its photographic data. For Hujar, additionally they reveal his use of two cameras: a twin-lens 120mm producing 12 sq. frames per roll (his most well-liked), and a barely extra transportable 35mm digicam producing 24 or 36 rectangular frames.
The e-book opens, and the exhibition begins, with a sequence of portrait thumbnails. Read individually, they’re provisional encounters, glimpses of Hujar as the topic of the lens slightly than its agent. Together, they accumulate right into a life assembled in fragments. There is one thing quietly affecting in regards to the shifting temporality. A younger man bare on a deckchair squints into the lens; the identical man, now bearded, is caught in a public rest room mirror. A 3rd picture, shirtless on a mattress, would later underpin his now iconic Portraits in Life and Death. Some are self-portraits taken utilizing a timer or shot in mirrors, others had been taken by sitters who briefly held the digicam. McCall describes her first encounter with the archive as a technique of “getting to know Peter”, residing 4 a long time of his life within the house of two months. These opening thumbnails compress that span into only a handful of pages.
What makes the contact sheets so compelling is their tactility and bodily intimacy. Marked instantly by Hujar’s hand, they reveal his course of by means of dots, crosses, crop marks and annotations. In the sooner work particularly, the mark-making is emphatic, with tight crop bins round faces suggestive of the prints to come back. Occasionally one thing extra playful surfaces. On a sheet of Jackie Curtis, Hujar wrote ‘Vogue’ above her head, as if auditioning the picture as {a magazine} cowl. Throughout the e-book, the marks grow to be sparser as his creative command is refined. “He knows what he wants,” McCall says. “It becomes more about marking a favourite frame.” Though lots of these chosen frames, intriguingly, had been by no means printed in any respect.
The characters who populate the sheets level to the downtown social world he moved by means of. Friends, lovers, ex-lovers, and artists repeat throughout the years. Among the recurring faces are Linda Rosenkrantz, Fran Lebowitz, John Erdman and Lynn Davis, alongside lovers together with Joseph Raffael and Paul Thek. The contact sheets testify to the social intimacy of a creative subculture current in New York. This closeness is clear in a shoot of Greer Lankton; a 35mm strip that strikes from staged studio poses to the ultimate body of her at his kitchen desk, smoking and speaking. “Those are things that he never would have printed,” McCall says. “Hujar wasn’t just using the camera as an artist, he was using it to document his relationships with people.”
The pictures of David Wojnarowicz are apparent standouts. Wojnarowicz was first a lover, later a detailed and influential presence within the final six years of his life. Across the archive, his picture returns numerous instances over and but there are solely two devoted studio periods. One can hint a shift in method and a tightening of intent. In the primary, Hujar remains to be working by means of a brand new method to gentle, testing it, Smith explains, in an nearly “mathematical way”, bouncing gentle to construct shadow throughout Wojnarowicz’s face. The second session is extra resolved, and it’s there that the better-known pictures emerge. The change is much less conceptual than it’s sensible, a refinement that enables one thing beforehand out of attain to settle.
In January 1987, Hujar was identified with AIDS. He died the next November, aged 53, with Wojnarowicz and shut good friend Ethyl Eichelberger by his aspect. In his diary, Wojnarowicz wrote that Hujar’s demise was “printed on celluloid on the backs of my eyes”; grief described by means of the very medium of inquiry. For years, Hujar’s work has sat on the sides of up to date tradition and artwork historical past. It wasn’t till Smith’s The Speed of Life exhibition in 2018 that his profile gained momentum, and inside the previous few years, we’ve tipped right into a type of Hujar-mania: biographies, reprints, journal covers, exhibitions, a bottle film (Peter Hujar’s Day) starring Ben Whishaw. Once a fringe determine transferring by means of the downtown margins, Hujar has now entered the mainstream.
Yet the contact sheets supply one thing the now-canonical pictures can’t. They present the work not as mounted or resolved, however within the technique of turning into, inseparable from the life being lived alongside it. There is an intimacy to the contact sheet that’s directly materials and social, held in its marks, repetitions, and proximities. Perhaps the contact sheets start to resemble Hujar’s ultimate main physique of labor, hidden in plain sight for many years after his demise. The final 40 years could possibly be seen as a type of creating course of, the exposures left dormant of their chemical tub, ready for the situations of visibility to reach. Only now, lifted from their plastic sleeves, does the world contained inside them start to totally emerge.
Hujar: Contact is revealed by Mack and is out now. An exhibition of the identical title is on present at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York till 25 October 2026.