Peter Hujar
His intimate black-and-white portraits of downtown New York were barely known during his lifetime – today he is one of the great American photographers.
Peter Hujar grew up with his grandparents on a farm in New Jersey and later with his mother in New York, in difficult circumstances. He left home at 16 and worked as an assistant to commercial photographers.
In the 1960s and 1970s he photographed the artists, writers, drag queens and gay men of New York’s downtown scene with great calm and precision: the actress Candy Darling on her deathbed, the writer Susan Sontag, the drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, but also animals, landscapes and the ruins of the Hudson River piers. His only book during his lifetime, “Portraits in Life and Death” (1976), combined portraits of friends with photographs of mummies in the catacombs of Palermo.
Hujar was openly gay. For a time he was the lover and later the mentor and closest friend of the young artist David Wojnarowicz, who regarded him as a father figure. Hujar was also a model in the Gay Liberation Front’s posters.
He died of AIDS in New York in 1987, aged 53. Wojnarowicz photographed and filmed him on his deathbed. Today his work is shown in major museums around the world.