The Brooklyn Rail

It would be possible to describe the past couple of years as a Peter Hujar renaissance of sorts: a major retrospective in London that has since travelled to Bonn, Germany; the release of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Peter Hujar’s Day, since adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Ira Sachs; a reissue of his sole published photobook, Portraits in Life and Death, in 2024 (first published in 1976); Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a joint biography of Hujar and Paul Thek; and a full biography by John Douglas Millar forthcoming.

However, this would overlook the sustained interest in Hujar’s work amongst curators and art historians over the past decade and the intense and brilliant work done at the Morgan Library & Museum since acquiring the Peter Hujar Papers in 2013. Hujar:Contact (on view through October 25, 2026) is the second major display and publication from the Morgan to draw on Hujar’s archive, after 2018’s Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (now out of print). They hold approximately 5,700 contact sheets that span the entirety of Hujar’s career, from the 1950s up to his death in November 1987. In the final months of his life, Hujar destroyed a significant amount of material, including finished prints he deemed imperfect and contact sheets he didn’t want to survive him.

Hujar:Contact reproduces 110 contact sheets—mostly in full—alongside some enlargements and isolated prints. It’s part of a broader archival turn in curation and publishing: making resources available to the casual viewer, which might otherwise remain accessible only to scholars and researchers in study rooms and libraries.

Published in collaboration with MACK—an independent and award-winning publisher of art books, based in London—this is more than an exhibition catalogue. Every contact print is presented on a plain, black background—with a specific shine and a sumptuous blackness to the pages—which elegantly frames each photographic print. Hujar primarily worked in black and white and he was known to play carefully with areas of negative space when printing his photographs. There is a loss of materiality, especially the colored oil pencil Hujar used to select his final prints, but the color still pops, here—a shock of red or yellow amidst the grays.

Though many of these contact sheets have been digitized, something is invariably lost by this process and having them thoughtfully printed in this collection sticks far closer to the original.

Morgan curator Joel Smith provides minor contextual notes in the catalogue, but is largely hands off. A contact sheet demonstrates the process of selection, from raw material to final shot. In a similar way, the contact sheets included here have been winnowed down, from thousands to dozens. There are the famous portraits and more innocuous shoots, such as a roll of film used while wandering downtown Manhattan on an Easter Sunday. Hujar is trying; he is finding and refining his eye.

Hujar’s two job books are some of his only writings in his archive. The best insight into his schedule and work ethic, the books span nearly nine hundred shoots, from 1955 to 1986. (Several of his more personal appointment books remain too.) Transcribed in the catalogue with annotations by art historian Olivia McCall, these books provide additional context, explaining initials and personal references, and making connections between the appointments and the photographs themselves. It’s quite a sudden shift from one register (contact sheets) to the other (job books), but the sheer wealth of material warrants, and rewards, careful perusal.

While a more conventional catalogue might include a critical essay or assessment of Hujar’s subjects, this gesture offers something different, something more profound—it frees these resources from the confines of the scholarly archive or exhibition. The book offers the opportunity to get closer to the contact sheets than any exhibition would allow; while a certain materiality is necessarily lost, the proximity and immediacy is unparalleled.

“Attempting to understand a life through material traces left behind is just that: an attempt,” McCall writes in a blog post for The Morgan, reflecting on her time as a curatorial fellow spent working on Hujar’s papers. “It is imperfect and, at times, impossible.” There is a tendency to try and thoroughly narrate such lives, to impose a full life onto these fragments—which are at once so close and yet so far. This publication does something altogether different, leaning into the fragmentary and allowing each reader to make their own imperfect attempt, to find their own point of contact.