Peter Hujar was a leading figure of the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and ’80s—a period of highly experimental art, theater, music and club culture. He is most well known for his sensitive portraits of New York City’s avant-garde artists, musicians, writers, and performers, featuring personalities such as Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, David Wojnarowicz, Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, and Ethyl Eichelberger, who populated the gay-disco-drag performance-cruising underground life that has since vanished. 

Left: John Heys in Lana Turner’s Gown (I) 1979. Right: Fran Lebowitz at Home in Morristown 1974. Both photographs:© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.\

Even as he established early associations with New York’s avant-garde art community, Hujar spent the first years of his career working as a commercial photographer for fashion and music magazines. The reverberations of the notorious 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn inspired Hujar to begin photographing New York’s marginalized LGBTQ community, notably in his iconic 1969 photograph of the Gay Liberation Front.

In the early 1970s Hujar consciously turned his back on the commercial mainstream, moving into a loft in the East Village and adopting a bohemian life of poverty, taking paying jobs only when necessary and focusing on the subjects that compelled him. In a video produced by The Morgan Library & Museum, Fran Lebovitz, interviewed by curator Joel Smith described a nocturnal lifestyle that began with club-hopping, followed by all-night movies at the Elgin Theater, ending with more movies at MoMA before going to sleep around 3pm.

Deeply admired for his commitment to his craft and his subjects, Hujar was nevertheless not commercially successful during his lifetime, never having a solo gallery show until he was forty-two. Hujar died of AIDS-related pneumonia at age 56 in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of work that has gradually found new audiences, with a number of exhibitions and books having been produced during the last several years.

Left: Candy Darling on her Deathbed, 1973.Right: Gary Schneider in Contortion (2), 1979. Both images, © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 

A major retrospective, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, organized by The Morgan Library & Museum and Madrid’s Fundacion MAPFRE, opened last week at the University of California, Berkely Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives. Drawn from the extensive holdings of his work at the Morgan and from nine other collections, the show of more than 140 photographs, and its catalog, follow Hujar from his beginnings in the mid-1950s to his central role in the East Village art scene three decades later.

The subjects of his art, Hujar wrote, were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and “cling to the freedom to be themselves.” He lavished a portraitist’s attention on subjects who defied it in some way—such as drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, who became the most photographed person in his body of work. Drag queens and other gender-nonconforming subjects held a special interest for Hujar, whose haunting hospital-bed portrait of transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling just months before her death from lymphoma, became the most widely reproduced photograph of his career.

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, is on view at the University of California ,Berkely Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives through November 18, 2018. Info Visitors are invited to join BAMPFA Curatorial Assistant Matthew Coleman for an exhibition walk-through on Sunday, July 29 at 3 p.m.

The 248-page catalogue (Aperture 2017) features full-page reproductions of all works in the exhibition, essays by curator Joel Smith, Philip Gefter, and Steve Turtell, and the first fully researched chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography to be published on Hujar.

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life is curated by Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head at the Morgan Library & Museum. The BAMPFA presentation is organized by Apsara DiQuinzio, curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator, with Matthew Coleman, curatorial assistant.