Online | Closer Look: Hujar’s Contact Sheets

Join Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, and Olivia McCall for a close look at the contact sheets of photographer Peter Hujar. Printed in small grids, the artist’s contact sheets offer glimpses into his creative process, reading as intimate pictorial narratives and bearing editing marks that reveal his thinking about cropping and printing. This discussion explores the ways in which Hujar’s contact sheets offer insights into the exposures he ultimately decided to enlarge.

This is an online program. Attendees will receive a Zoom link on the morning of the program.

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez is a historian, photographer, and archivist. He is a professor in the Department of Art History at New York University. He is the author of Newspaper (New York: Primary Information, 2023), a reassemblage of the publication by Steven Lawrence, Peter Hujar, and Andrew Ullrick. Yáñez holds a PhD in Art History from Stanford University.

Olivia McCall is an art historian and curator whose work advances scholarship on artists bearing witness to the AIDS epidemic and queer experience in the 1970s–90s, with a focus on lens-based media. She is a PhD candidate at Bryn Mawr College and holds an MA in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. From 2022–2024, McCall was the Edith Gowin Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Morgan Library & Museum.

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