Peter Hujar

Following his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, at the age of 53, the photographer Peter Hujar left behind a profound body of work that documented New York City’s subcultures, from the queer to the avant-garde. His raw, unflinching and vulnerable black-and-white portraits received little recognition during his lifetime, but are now celebrated for their responses to the pleasures and pains of love, and have made Hujar a cult hero.

Born in 1934 in New Jersey, Hujar was raised on a farm by his Ukrainian-speaking grandparents. In 1946 he moved to New York City, living with his mother and her second husband, but fled the abusive household aged 16. It was around this time he acquired his first camera.

After graduating from the School of Industrial Art, Hujar worked as a commercial photographer. By 1967, he decided to focus on art photography, in particular work exploring his homosexuality. Two years later, with his lover, the political activist Jim Fouratt, Hujar witnessed first-hand the Stonewall riots.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hujar immersed himself in downtown Manhattan’s bohemian world, shooting activists, drag queens, artists and writers, including Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz and his lover, David Wojnarowicz. In 1973 he took one of his best known photographs, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, showing the transgender actress dying aged 29 from lymphoma. In 1976 he published his only book, Portraits in Life and Death, now considered an icon of American photography.

Hujar would also shoot cityscapes, animals and architectural ruins — but always with the same sense of intimacy and respect that made his portraiture so profound. ‘I photograph those who push themselves to any extreme. That’s what interests me, and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves,’ he said.