Hujar:Contact – The Brooklyn Rail

Hujar:Contact
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 22–October 25, 2026
New York

Some artists minimize near the bone. Biography and delusion conspire to go away us with a wondrous and terrifying feeling of recognition. In different phrases, there are artists in whom we see ourselves, kindred spirits who’ve, via destiny and foresight, understood the best way of issues as we do. For me, that artist is the late photographer Peter Hujar, and I think I’m not alone, given the ever-growing fascination with each Hujar and his pictures. Consider Andrew Durbin’s 2026 twin biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek and Ira Sachs’s 2025 movie Peter Hujar’s Day. But pictures, like reverence, is a wily factor—the one born from truth and clothed in fiction, the opposite born from fiction and clothed actually. Susan Sontag—good good friend, occasional topic, and mental drive in Hujar’s life—put it greatest: pictures “are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”

Such is the case with Hujar:Contact, an exhibition of greater than 110 contact sheets—drawn from an archive of 5,783 sheets, a dizzying feat by present curator Joel Smith—and twenty enlargements, spanning the years 1954 to 1985. Smith’s chronological framing is probably the present’s most simple curatorial conceit, lending it one thing of a forensic-meets-all-knowing sensibility. And but, the mapping of dates, the grafting of timelines onto technical developments, the binding of this second to that place, all do little to dispel the aura that surrounds Hujar or the totemic cost invested in his pictures.

Without query, Smith’s formal evaluation—paired with Olivia McCall’s heroic decipherment of Hujar’s cryptic “job books”—can be of nice worth to Hujar students. But what can be made manifest is the hand of destiny and likelihood in Hujar’s life. The precision of Smith’s feat and the granular depth the contact sheets afford solely sharpen how singular the occasions and figures Hujar captured had been. Hujar’s New York, his circle of associates and topics, asserts a legendary affect on tradition to this present day. After all, what’s to not marvel at: Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Marsha P. Johnson. All the good queer patron saints are there. Retrospection, nevertheless, is the dual of prophecy: each lay declare to a future that has not but arrived. An exhibition led by the one reads as an act of the opposite. Is this a nasty factor? Not if the promise of daring magnificence and brilliance, even when haunted by demise’s specter, is what you search.

Thus, within the sequence of pictures Hujar made on his 1963 journey to the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo—his second journey to Italy, along with his then-lover, the painter Paul Thek—we see the eleven pictures from the collection Hujar would later use to shut his solely monograph, Portraits in Life and Death (1976). In one other contact sheet, Canal Street Pier with David Wojnarowicz (1983), we observe Hujar throughout his forays into the crumbling Canal Street Pier, his one-time lover and lifelong collaborator David Wojnarowicz showing in a single body subsequent to a graffito cow, in one other, behind a cloudy pane of glass. There’s a mortal circularity to Hujar photographing Wojnarowicz; too quickly it could be Wojnarowicz photographing Hujar’s lifeless visage shortly after his demise from AIDS-related issues in 1987. Death stalks Hujar’s pictures, for him and for us. Speaking of: included within the present are the contact sheets behind one in all Hujar’s most iconic pictures—Candy Darling in her hospital mattress at Cabrini Health Care Center, bodega flowers in vases in every single place (1973). I’ve at all times cherished this image: Darling’s languid pose, that platinum hair, her flawless lip. It’s a Horst P. Horst glamour portrait, staged on a deathbed. The shoot’s contact sheets are a revelation, not as a result of they reveal how staged the picture was—Superstar Darling was too schooled in Andy Warhol’s methods of self-fashioning for it to be the rest—however as a result of they convey Darling’s singular imaginative and prescient of magnificence and style. Her demise was going to be a last efficiency of divine flawlessness. John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet of physique and soul who spent his life preoccupied by ideas of mortality and heaven, staged his demise portrait as he lay stricken in his last days. “Mighty and dreadful,” Donne rebuked demise: “thou art not so.” Death shadows Hujar’s topics—Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Hujar himself, all from AIDS-related issues—however there are additionally fearlessness and vitality and curiosity within the lives that had been lived earlier than their ends.