Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, renowned photographer Peter Hujar documented New York City’s burgeoning art community. His iconic portraits included the likes of John Waters, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, Divine, William S. Burroughs and more.
Outside of his typical portraits, much of Hujar’s work highlighted eroticism in many forms, from exploring the curves and positionings of one’s body to his own ethereal nude self-portraits.
His 1969 photograph “Orgasmic Man” serves as the ubiquitous cover for Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, and it acts as a Rorschach test of sorts of whether the audience views the subject to be in pain, ecstasy or both.
Hujar’s work also reveled in morbidity, including a photo of Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis lying in her open casket and a series of images of Candy Darling in her hospital bed taken weeks before her death.
Hujar would only publish one book of photographs in his lifetime: Portraits in Life and Death. The collection featured 29 of his creative portraits and 11 images of mummified bodies in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, displaying a dark duality of life and death.
That Palermo trip would be the culmination of Hujar’s time in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar, which he spent with his longtime partner, sculptor Paul Thek. Their complicated relationship is documented in a new dual biography by Andrew Durbin.
Hujar’s life was ultimately cut short by AIDS. He would pass in 1987 at the age of 53, and Thek would face the same fate just nine months later at 54.
Artist David Wojnarowicz photographed Hujar’s body in the immediate aftermath of his death, a fitting and haunting send-off from his mentee and former lover. In a macabre irony, Hujar died in room 1423 at Cabrini Health Care Center—the very same room where he photographed Darling a decade prior.
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