Hujar: Contact offers an unprecedented look into the life, times, and creative evolution of a master photographer. The exhibition features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from the Morgan’s Peter Hujar Collection, which includes over 5,700 contact sheets from throughout the artist’s career.
Peter Hujar (1934–1987) began filing contact sheets and assigning them job numbers at age twenty-one. His records make it possible to track his development—from two decades as a studio assistant (1955–67), when he pushed himself to try work of every kind, into the late 1960s and his work as a freelancer in fashion, music, and advertising, through his mature period (1974–87) as a fiercely independent and influential artist in the East Village.
Many of the contact sheets bear editing marks that indicate ideas about cropping and printing and contextualize the exposures Hujar ultimately decided to enlarge. The intense, interactive quality of his portrait work comes to life in contact sheets that read as intimate pictorial narratives, revealing the nature of his attention and the unique personality of each of his subjects. As Hujar matures and struggles, and as the character of his social world changes from the 1950s through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, his contact sheets tell the nuanced story of a lifetime, a community, and an era.
Organized by Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography.
Contact sheet: Susan Sontag. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013, 2013.108:8.2310. © The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS).