On the occasion of the publication of Andrew Durbin’s dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, MoMA presents a four-day screening program of work shaped by the legacies of these two artists.
The series includes footage of and by Peter Hujar and Paul Thek—alongside works by such friends and contemporaries as Gregory J. Markopoulos, Gary Schneider, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol. Over four evenings, Durbin will join writers, filmmakers, and curators in conversation about the many entanglements that defined Hujar and Thek’s underappreciated careers from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. This program and Durbin’s publication elucidate the complex, transnational, and radical ambitions of two artists, friends, lovers, and cultural figureheads who changed art in the second half of the 20th century.
Organized by Andrew Durbin, Editor-in-Chief, frieze magazine, with Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance.
Photographers Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes are by no means a natural pairing, which makes this exhibition all the more intriguing. Hujar created lush black-and-white pictures documenting members of his circle like artists Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, both of whom were romantically involved with Hujar; Deschenes is known for conceptual photography exploring how our eyes make sense of the medium. These two practices seem quite unalike, but the artists are similar, a description of the show claims, because they both “employ the fundamental properties of the medium—light, chemistry and time—to explore what a photograph can be.” The exhibition could be eye-opening, and maybe a little beguiling.
Andrew Durbin is a poet, novelist and editor. His upcoming dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026) traces the friendship and romance between the artists, from their first encounter to the painful end of their relationship in the mid-1970s.
CS Can you talk about the development of your relationship to Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, as an editor and writer yourself?
AD The first time I saw a large collection of Peter’s work was in 2018 at the Morgan Library. That same year, I had wanted to write a play about Peter and Paul’s relationship, an idea that I eventually shelved. In early 2021, my editor and I were discussing my writing a book related to queer art, and I said, “It has to be Peter Hujar.” Since then, there has been an explosion in Peter’s renown: the Raven Row show, Ira Sachs’s film Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), and the Linda Rosenkrantz book on which it was based, as well as a large exhibition of his early photography at the Ukrainian Museum in New York. With Paul Thek, the revival has been slightly slower, but there are some major shows planned for the next few years. We live in a moment where people are craving authenticity. If you look at these two artists, they had very specific, uncompromising artistic visions. In the contemporary art world – whether you’re thinking about the market, how galleries are structured or AI – there are so many compromises asked of artists today. It’s impossible to live in a city like London or New York on the kind of budget that Peter and Paul lived on. In many ways, the world that made them possible, that allowed art to live and create so radically – that world doesn’t exist anymore.
MP Both artists seemed fated, in part due to their own volatile personalities, to remain on the sidelines.
AD In some ways, Peter was a victim of photography’s awkward position in the mid-20th-century art world. He wasn’t a Richard Avedon-style commercial photographer, and the gallery system hadn’t yet accepted photographers as artists in the way we think of them now. He straddled these worlds – commercial and fine art – but there wasn’t really a space for work like his. Though Paul’s path was more obvious, he refused to make paintings or sculptures that were palatable for most people.
CS I adore the book’s introduction, which describes a moment at the Chiesetta della Madonna della Civita in Ponza, Italy, where you look for an “unremarkable but beloved” portrait of the Madonna and Child, that the locals had entrusted Paul Thek to touch up. Did the process of writing the book involve both geographical and art-historical journeying?
AD I felt that I had to go to all the places where they lived or worked. In Ponza, I met people who knew Paul, who housed him, and I saw many of his works in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms. There were other places, such as Casteldaccia, where Paul lived in a tower in 1962–63, where I could only find some small trace of him, like the view that he would have had from his window. Still, I always learned something new every visit. The research into Peter’s life was much easier since he was a fastidious organiser of his own archive; it’s all more or less in one place – the Morgan Library. Paul, on the other hand, was the opposite: much of his work is in different private collections or has been destroyed, so I had to chase a lot of things down.
CS When you are writing about people who have died, you have to extrapolate certain facts or feelings. Is this a typical poetic license lent to the writing of biography?
AD While I was writing the book, I encountered a few gaps in their lives where we don’t quite know what they were doing. For example, there’s not much from the period from 1960 to 1962, when Peter and Paul first got together. That made writing this book tricky – so much of a relationship takes place between two people in a private room, between two gazes. I never wanted to invent scenarios or moments for them, of course, and I often signal to the reader that some things are missing or unknown, but I also understood that I had a responsibility as a writer to provide some understanding of what was happening between them. I always drew on their own materials – letters, photographs, diaries – as well as the memories of their friends, in attempting to reconstruct something of their feelings. Paul kept many notebooks, and he wrote constantly about himself. He often reflected on past relationships, too. So, I usually had enough material to work out some of their feelings.
MP Peter had a close relationship with animals, and in some ways, his photography of animals feels more intimate than that of humans. What did animals allow him to access?
AD Many people who watched Peter photograph animals remember how special those moments were. His communication with them was so intimate and fundamental. Peter grew up on a farm, and he had a complicated, destructive relationship with his family. In my book, Fran Lebowitz says that Peter saw something of himself in the suffering of animals, which is why his animal photographs have such incredible pathos. I was very annoyed with Susan Sontag when I was writing this book. On Photography reduces photography to the machine itself. But a great photograph is so dependent on the sensibility of an individual’s eye. Those animal photographs really make that clear, because nobody photographs a cow or duck like Peter.
CS You quote Peter saying that he doesn’t want to be remembered as a gay photographer. Similarly, Paul’s sexuality was complicated.
AD At times, Paul struggled with his sexuality – he was mostly attracted to men, but homosexuality often struck him as flawed and empty; he badly wanted a wife and kids. There were periods when I was working on Paul where I felt demoralised and exhausted because of the depths of his torment. I wished, in a naive way, that I could hold his hand, but many people tried that in his life, and it didn’t work.
MP Both artists died of AIDS-related complications, but you write at the start that you don’t want their narratives to be defined by this fact. How was writing the end of the book?
AD By the 1980s, Peter and Paul were no longer speaking, but I knew I wanted to somehow bring them together again. I thought about a beautiful letter the artist Ann Wilson sent to Peter when she learned he was sick. In it, she quotes the Eucharistic prayer – something that becomes a throughline in the epilogue of my book. Both men struggled with their faith, but faith was important to them, and faith allowed me to hold them close at the end. It’s an elegy.
The exhibition Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark in the Bundeskunsthalle (Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany) in Bonn focuses on Hujar’s work since the 1970s and reflects his exploration of the relational possibilities of the grid. It was curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar and his friend Gary Schneider, in close collaboration with the photographer’s estate
When Hujar died of AIDS-related pneumonia, his work was largely unknown. Today, however, Peter Hujar is considered one of the most important photographers of the second half of the 20th century.
The exhibition was originally organized by Raven Row with thanks to the Peter Hujar Foundation. Curators: John Douglas Millar, Gary Schneider Exhibition publication: Peter Hujar. Eyes Open in the Dark, 144 pages, 134 illustrations, in German language, Publishing house of the bookshop Walther und Franz König, Cologne, ISBN 978 3 7533 0972 9 In partnership with the Bundeskunsthalle, the Gropius Bau, Berlin, presents from March 19 to June 28, 2026: Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision.
From sensitive portraits by Peter Hujar to Old Master paintings depicting beauty and ugliness, there’s so much to see within a day’s trip from the Maastricht fair
By Samuel Reilly, published March 1, 2026. From the March 2026 issue of Apollo.
Peter Hujar is best known for his photographic portraits: essential records of the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and ’80s in which he was a key participant until his death from Aids-related pneumonia in 1987. Curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar and his friend and printer Gary Schneider, this exhibition was widely acclaimed during its first run at Raven Row in London last year for revealing the true breadth of Hujar’s vision. Portraits of friends and collaborators including Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Paul Thek and William S. Burroughs, ranging from the tender to the provocative, are on display alongside less well-known compositions, including Hujar’s studies of the glittering waters of the Hudson.
“Eyes Open in the Dark” in Bonn: Peter Hujar’s portraits show the life of the queer New York scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
It is a true symphony of powerful gazes and intimate glimpses, of observations that are never casual, but rather capture moments from the life of the US photographer Peter Hujar in stark, stark black and white. With his portraits of friends and lovers, the people who flanked his everyday life in the clubs, on the stages, and on the streets of downtown Manhattan, Hujar retrospectively became a chronicler of the 1970s and 1980s. He himself did not aspire to this. The refined and, at heart, apolitical aesthete could not, however, as a photographer and part of the scene, avoid registering the socio-political urgency of the emerging gay rights movement and with, great empathy, capturing the incredible tragedy that AIDS brought with it in melancholic images.
In the exhibition “Eyes Open in the Dark” at the Bundeskunsthalle, Hujar accompanies the lively street parties of the queer community at the West Side Piers with his camera on Easter Sunday 1976 and photographs his ex-lover, the dancer Bruce de Sainte Croix, naked. First as the epitome of youthful innocence and vulnerability like Michelangelo’s “David”, then sitting and preoccupied with his erection, finally kneeling in masturbation: a triptych with which Hujar and Sainte Croix move into a “forbidden zone” of male nude photography, as Sainte Croix admits in an interview (the exhibition is recommended for ages 18 and up).
A few years later, the mood shifted abruptly: with the first AIDS diagnoses and the first deaths in the scene, Hujar’s visual world darkened. In January 1987, he was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease. At the end of the year, he died of AIDS-related pneumonia. “23 photos of Peter. 23 genes in one chromosome. Room 1423” reads an envelope containing contact prints made by his former lover, David Wojnarowicz, of his deceased friend. Three very powerful studies from the series are on display in the Bonn exhibition. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992; the painter Paul Thek, one of the most influential people in the photographer’s life succumbed to the disease six months after Hujar. In Room 1423, Hujar had photographed the dying Candy Darling—a star from Andy Warhol’s Factory—in 1974.
The exhibition begins with juxtaposition of all of Hujar’s thematic areas: a woman’s shoe (for Elizabeth) and a dead cat, the portrait of actor and editor of the magazine “Gay Power,” John Heys, a urinating stranger, a discarded carpet, a New York backyard and parking spaces, drag star John Flowers on the toilet, or Richie Gallo in an S&M costume on the sidelines of the production “The Life & Times of Joseph Stalin.” Hujar himself is said to have appreciated this type of presentation. He called it “Grid.” He practiced the principle in the underground newspaper “Newspaper” as well as in his last exhibition. Hujar wanted to create the associative leaps that exciting juxtapositions enable.
“Eyes Open in the Dark” is a captivating, fast-paced, breathtaking, and atmospheric kaleidoscope of the New York scene, further charged by the intensity of the gazes. There are Butch and Buster, fixing the viewer with their eyes, Cookie Meuller gazing into the distance with bedroom eyes, and baby John McClellan blinking in the camera. The writer William Burroughs, in a boldly patterned outfit, gazes up sadly from his plaid blanket, and the publicist Susan Sontag broods over something with her arms folded behind her head.
Butch and Buster, by the way, are two cows that Hujar photographed in Westtown New York. Throughout his life, Hujar also felt connected to that sphere. After all, the photographer, born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, had grown up on the farm of his Galician-Ukrainian grandparents before his mother, Rose, moved to Manhattan with Peter in 1945. Hujar’s youth was marked by alcoholism, verbal and physical violence. He studied photography, received important inspiration on a trip to Italy, and through contact with neorealist directors such as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, through Paul Thek, the writers Linda Rosenkrantz and Susan Sontag, he came into contact with intellectual circles. For a long lime. Hujar was considered an insider tip in Germany — after all, Klaus Honnef showed photographs by Hujar in his 1982 exhibition “Lichtbildnisse” (Portraits) at the Rheinisches Landesmuscum Bonn. However, his work is currently experiencing a true renaissance. In addition to “Eyes Open in the Dark” in Bonn, in cooperation with Raven Row, London, and the Hujar Foundation, the Gropius Bau in Berlin is also celebrating the photographer simultaneously, together with the New York painter Liz Deschenes. Last autumn, Ira Sachs brought his sensitive portrait “Peter Hujar’s Day” to cinemas. Ben Whishaw plays the photographer. The film is based on a 1974 tape interview. In it, he recounts how he photographed Allen Ginsberg on the Lower East Side. The Beat Generation star was sitting in the lotus position in a doorway and began to sing. Hujar was disturbed: “May God interrupt me?”
(This article has been translated from the original German.)
“Eyes Open in the Dark” will be exhibited at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany from February 27–August 23, 2026. See exhibition details.
We are sad to announce the passing of Stephen Koch (1941-2026)
In 1987 after Peter Hujar died from AIDS, Stephen inherited his estate. Peter’s wish was for Stephen to carry on his legacy, bringing his photographs to a wider audience. Recalling the moment when Peter Hujar told him “I have decided that you should have the pictures,” Stephen wrote in Harper’s magazine, “I must have said something. I can’t remember or even imagine what. I do remember exactly what I felt. I felt my destiny changing course.” Then Peter said, “You’re a dear one, Stephen. You really are.”
We’re so grateful for the work he’s done all these years, with his unwavering persistence. His long career as the executor of Peter Hujar’s estate coincided with his longer careers as an author (of fiction and nonfiction), a historian and a teacher.
Stephen along with his personality, presence and guidance will be deeply missed.
Given Peter Hujar’s talent for capturing subjects in quiet, vulnerable moments, exhibitions of his black-and-white portrait photography tend to feel like intimate affairs, but this survey in Bonn feels especially personal. It was co-curated by his friend Gary Schneider and his biographer John Douglas Millar (27 February–23 August). The exhibition, which first ran at Raven Row in London last year, assembles snapshots the artist took in New York between the mid 1970s and mid ’80s. These range from the deeply personal, such as a photo of Hujar’s friend and lover Paul Thek lying in a clearing among Florida pines, to the artfully staged – including Hujar’s shot of the Warhol superstar Candy Darling on her deathbed, staring down the camera, in 1973. Also on display are photos of William S. Burroughs and Susan Sontag, striking cityscapes and a haunting photo of a cow behind barbed wire – taken in a farm in Westtown near the New Jersey border – that Hujar once referred to as a self-portrait.
Find out more from the Bundeskunsthalle’s website.
In a city defined by reinvention, the Gropius Bau presents Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision, a striking intergenerational dialogue in photography that challenges the boundaries of the medium. Bringing together two artists whose practices span nearly half a century, the exhibition foregrounds the clarity of vision that defines their work while exploring photography as a material and conceptual practice. Hujar and Deschenes treat light, chemistry, space and perception as integral elements of image-making, expanding photography far beyond simple representation. This is the first major exhibition in Berlin for both artists, situating their work in conversation with contemporary practice and historical context. Visitors encounter not only photographs and photograms but a meditation on vision itself. The show positions both artists as rigorous observers of human experience and the material world.
“I make uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects. I photograph those who push themselves to any extreme and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves,” Hujar once said. Working in New York from the 1960s to the 1980s, he documented the cultural era between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis, producing images of enduring emotional and historical resonance. His masterclass with Richard Avedon in 1967 prompted him to abandon commercial photography and dedicate himself fully to his art. Hujar’s meticulous approach to presentation, combined with his uncompromising character, meant he never achieved mainstream recognition during his lifetime. It was only after his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1987 that his work gained the wider acclaim it deserved. Hujar’s photographs serve as both documentary evidence and intimate reflection, bridging personal and historical narratives.
Liz Deschenes, born in Boston in 1966, represents a different generation yet shares Hujar’s dedication to experimentation and vision. With a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, she interrogates the fundamental properties of photography – light, chemistry and time – and pushes the medium beyond conventional representation. Deschenes’ work spans photograms, glass, and sculptural interventions that blur the line between image and object. Early projects such as Elevations and Green Screen manipulate monochrome colour, while more recent moonlight-exposed photograms reveal subtle tonal shifts and silvery textures. Her sculptures and glass works introduce motion, spatial awareness, and viewer engagement into the exhibition, reflecting on how perception is shaped by context. “My work is often in reaction to the limited scope that photography is often understood by. I think photography is capable of much more than representing a particular moment in time,” she explains.
Persistence of Vision stages a dialogue between Hujar’s intimate, often intense imagery and Deschenes’ conceptual, process-driven works. Several galleries use grid installations inspired by Hujar’s 1986 Gracie Mansion exhibition, arranging photographs in ensembles that resist strict categorisation. Cinematic depictions of New York at night converse with Deschenes’ moonlight photograms, highlighting their shared fascination with darkness not only as subject but as medium. Hujar’s ruins meet Deschenes’ Retaining sculptures, inspired by scaffolding systems designed to stabilise historic buildings, a pairing that resonates with the Gropius Bau itself, which remained a ruin for decades after wartime destruction. Through this, the exhibition emphasises how formal and conceptual differences can generate unexpected affinities. The show encourages visitors to reflect on the interconnections between image, space and perception.
Deschenes’ works introduce a dramaturgical rhythm, attuned to light, motion and the presence of bodies in space. Juxtaposed with Hujar’s intimate portraits, they invite viewers to linger, examining both image and environment. The exhibition positions photography as a medium that is simultaneously experiential, conceptual and historical, demanding engagement rather than passive observation. Hujar’s commitment to humanistic detail complements Deschenes’ process-driven rigor, creating a space where intimacy and abstraction coexist. This tension encourages reflection on perception, time and the act of seeing. In this way, the exhibition is as much about the mechanics of vision as it is about the works themselves.
Curated by Eva Respini of Vancouver Art Gallery and Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino of Gropius Bau, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Hujar and Deschenes’ work while placing it in dialogue with contemporary photography. Hujar’s portraits and urban landscapes are presented alongside Deschenes’ photograms and glass sculptures, revealing the generative power of juxtaposition. The show demonstrates how photography can be simultaneously intimate, conceptual and architectural, bridging generations and practices. By situating the works within the historical and spatial context of the Gropius Bau, the exhibition becomes a meditation on light, ruin and renewal. Both artists demonstrate that vision is not simply about what is captured, but how it is engaged with over time.
Persistence of Vision is not only a retrospective, but rather a conversation across time and practice, highlighting photography’s ongoing evolution. Hujar’s focus on humanity and Deschenes’ conceptual rigour combine to create a space that is visually, intellectually and emotionally resonant. Visitors are invited to engage with textures, shadows, architectural traces and subtle tonal shifts, experiencing the works as active agents in perception. In connecting historical depth with contemporary resonance, the show offers both reflection and revelation. It demonstrates that the act of looking is never passive, but always transformative, and that photography continues to speak across generations.
Peter Hujar, Ethyl Eichelberger and Agosto Machado, “Ruth Ruth,” 1984.Vintage gelatin silver print. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.
Maureen Paley is pleased to host Gordon Robichaux for Condo London 2026 with an exhibition of recent work by Agosto Machado at Studio M. For his London debut he will present a group of his shrines and altars alongside related ephemera and works by Sheyla Baykal, Caroline Goe, Peter Hujar, and Jack Smith.
Ethyl Eichelberger ‘Untitled (Mechanical paste-up)’ 1981, unique Peter Hujar gelatin silver print, pen, tape on paper. Courtesy Gordon Robichaux, New York via Instagram.
Agosto Machado is a Chinese-Spanish-Filipino-American performance artist, activist, archivist, muse, caretaker, and friend to countless celebrated and underground visual and performing artists. He has been a vital participant and witness to cultural and creative life in New York since the early sixties, from art, theater, performance, and film to social and political counterculture and the dawn of the gay liberation movement. As part of a cohort of queer revolutionaries, including Marsha P. Johnson, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, and Sylvia Rivera, Machado participated in the Stonewall Rebellion.
“In 1973, I travelled with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, founded by Ellen Stewart, to the Holland Festival (now called the Amsterdam International Festival). I had come into experimental theatre through my friendships with downtown New York figures like Jackie Curtis and Jack Smith, and La MaMa had become a refuge for me. After our performances, the company took a break. Some went on to Paris, I stayed in England for three weeks. I made London my base and took trips out to Cambridge, Hampton Court Palace, and Stonehenge, moving through the country mostly by the Underground and regional trains.
Stonehenge at that time, was completely open. There were no barriers, no guards keeping people at a distance. You could climb the stones, children ran and played among them, and people picked up small fragments as souvenirs. For me though, it felt like a pilgrimage. Standing there, touching those ancient stones, I felt a sense of spiritual reflection, something deeply personal being in the presence of one of the great wonders of the world.
As I moved through London and beyond, I was also watching the cultural shifts post Stonewall. Queer visibility was becoming more present in public life. Fashion and popular music were loosening the rules, opening up space for fluid gender and sexual identities. There was a feeling in the air, a new freedom, and traveling around London during that time, I felt myself very much a part of it.” – Agosto Machado, 2025.
Machado has presented two solo exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux in New York (2025 and 2022). His shrine and altar sculptures are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York.
New York–based gallery Ortuzar will now jointly represent the Peter Hujar Archive and Foundation with Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. The archive will continue to collaborate with Mai 36 Galerie in Zürich and Maureen Paley in London on select projects.
The news also means that the Hujar Archive will depart its longtime representative, Pace Gallery, which last mounted a solo show for Hujar at its 125 Newbury location in Tribeca in September 2023. The late artist’s archive had been represented by Pace/MacGill, a separate photography-focused gallery that was merged into Pace in 2020, since 2013.
Ales Ortuzar, the gallery’s founder, said he still recalls the first time he saw Hujar’s work nearly two decades ago, when Maureen Paley mounted an exhibition of the artist in London in 2008. “It’s work that has lived with me ever since—in my consciousness,” he said. “I’ve really cared deeply about it.”
He added, “Without sounding cheesy, it’s one of these situations where one has to sort of pinch oneself in excitement because Hujar is an artist I’ve cared about deeply for so long, and it’s a joy to welcome the archive into the gallery.”
The representation deal with Hujar’s archive and foundation, Ortuzar said, “happened in a very natural way. The estate got in touch with us, and we realized we had a lot of shared values. They had seen the work that we’ve done with certain artists in the States, from Joey Terrill to Suzanne Jackson.”
Hujar’s work has recently had a resurgence. Filmmaker Ira Sachs directed a 2025 biopic on the artist, with Ben Whishaw playing Hujar, and Liveright reissued his 1967 book Portraits in Life and Death, which established Hujar as one of the top talents of his generation. This year, the Morgan Library and Museum will open “Hujar: Contact,” focusing on its holdings of over 5,700 of the artist’s contact sheets, while the Gropius Bau will mount an exhibition, curated by Eva Respini, pairing Hujar’s work with that of Liz Deschenes.
Last year also saw his work feature in multiple high-profile museum exhibitions, like “Queer Histories” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and “Susan Sontag: Seeing and being seen” at the Kunsthalle Bonn in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include ones at Raven Row in London (2025), the Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and a collateral event to the 2024 Venice Biennale.
In an Art in America article reflecting on Hujar’s resurrection, art historian Jackson Davidow wrote, “[Hujar] is increasingly becoming a figure of pop art history, a fascinating case study in photographic subjectivity and identity from an era when the New York photography, art, and queer worlds had forged fraught yet flirtatious relationships.”
Ortuzar will mount its two concurrent exhibitions for Hujar this spring. The first, titled “The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited,” will re-create a Hujar exhibition mounted at the East Village gallery Gracie Mansion in 1986, a year before his death from AIDS-related complications. An iteration of that exhibition was mounted by Fraenkel Gallery last fall, and Ortuzar said the upcoming 40th anniversary of the now iconic exhibition prompted him to bring it back to New York.
The second will be a group exhibition focusing on artists of Hujar’s circle, curated by critic Andrew Durbin, who in April will publish The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, about the two artists’ decadeslong relationship. The exhibition, Ortuzar said, is “really explaining and reexplaining Peter and his context, his world, and his influence for a new generation of people who are new to the work who might not understand the context out of which this work evolved. That’s what we want to show.”
The actor reunites with director Ira Sachs on a new, experimental biopic about the iconic photographer. Here, they discuss why his work still resonates today
Published January 5, 2026 in Dazed. Text by Nick Chen
Peter Hujar’s Day (Film Still) Courtesy Janus Films
Ben Whishaw is a notoriously private person. Nevertheless, I’ve started our interview by asking the 45-year-old British actor how he got out of bed the previous day. “Yesterday, I woke up at around 7:30, but I knew I wanted more sleep,” says Whishaw. “I had a sense of excitement, because I’d had a really busy few days leading up to that morning, and I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t have to be anywhere.’ I turned over and lay in the dark for another half an hour. I got up and made myself a coffee. I didn’t have any breakfast. Maybe a handful of nuts.”
It’s a Thursday afternoon, on December 4, 2025, when I meet Whishaw and the 60-year-old American director Ira Sachs at the Londoner Hotel. Their latest collaboration after 2023’s Passages is Peter Hujar’s Day, a genre-defying film that’s neither documentary nor fiction. On December 19, 1974, the celebrated queer photographer Peter Hujar described his previous day in great detail to Linda Rosenkrantz, a writer who recorded and transcribed their conversation. With Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as the leads, Sachs’ film recreates that day’s events – not the day described, but the describing itself.
The result is hypnotic and deceptively simple: for 70 minutes, it’s a dialogue that focuses on the photographer’s previous day and nothing else. The action, if you can call it that, never leaves Rosenkrantz’s New York flat, except for smoke breaks on the balcony. It’s full of tantalising contradictions: a wordy, stagey piece that’s cinematic through grainy cinematography and avant-garde cutaways; an immersive, grounded drama that’s so Brechtian it ends on an applause break.
“It’s important to state emphatically that I had no mission to introduce people to Peter Hujar,” says Sachs. “It’s really about two actors on a set who are transmitting this conversation between Peter and Linda.” But it’s a happy accident if viewers discover Hujar’s work? “I like that you’re pushing back, even though I say that wasn’t my intention. On no level would I not want people to discover his work, because his work is a gift, particularly to queer people.”
In 1974, Hujar is 40 years old and ascending in his career. His previous day involves talking to Susan Sontag on the phone, and photographing Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times; he name-drops acquaintances like Fran Lebowitz, William S. Burroughs and Ed Baynard. He frets his day is “boring”, yet his account, including the ordering of Chinese food, is engrossing. It’s ultimately Hujar’s inquisitive energy, not his photography, that’s on display.
Sachs and Whishaw are avowed fans, the latter owning a 1980 self-portrait called “Seated Self-Portrait Depressed” in his home. “His art will always be as if it was made today,” says Whishaw. “It feels alive. He managed to catch an intimacy with people – actually, not just people, but frequently animals as well – where he could get them to be so open to him. When I try to take photos, that exchange is difficult, because lots of people understandably don’t want to be photographed. It’s quite an aggressive act, photographing someone. You’re sort of taking something from them. To encourage someone to feel relaxed, open, and able to be intimate – that was his great genius. And it’s what he saw in people as well.”
Sachs discovered the transcript in a gay book shop in France during the shooting of Passages. By then, the ums and ahs had already been removed. “The transcript is quite musical, exact and verbatim,” says Sachs. “I’m certain when Linda typed it up 51 years ago, she removed several ums. But she did not remove the natural inflexion of how people talk in conversation.”
“I had an impulse to make it more, ‘Oh, let me just find this word or phrase,’” says Whishaw. “But Ira kept saying, ‘Just keep talking.’ It had to have a certain amount of tension in it. It couldn’t just become soggy, meandering language.”
Hujar died in 1987, aged 53, from Aids. Throughout the film, Hujar agonises about his health and mortality; Rosenkrantz pleads for him to eat more vegetables. When Hujar describes closing his eyes and going to sleep, there’s a poetic finality to the statement.
“It’s a kind of literary device,” says Sachs. “We know more than the character, and that his life will end in 13 years.” But he’s agreed to be documented, and is preserving his legacy? “Yeah, but he’s really un-self-conscious, which I admire. His lack of defensiveness and trust in Linda is quite deep. It’s something I could never experience with my own therapist – he seems to totally trust that she’s going to be interested in anything he says.”
Peter Hujar’s Day (Film Still) Courtesy Janus Films
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.
Birth and death, sex and nature, and much more in this extraordinary exhibition of Peter Hujar’s photography
Peter Hujar — Eyes Open in the Dark
It sometimes feels like few in the art world care about beauty. Their hearts have hardened, their spirits are weak. For many, art is simply a vehicle for social change rather than a source of aesthetic bliss. So when an exhibition comes along that is devastatingly beautiful—in all its abject, tender, and spiritual forms—it is all the more shocking.
Peter Hujar’s pictures are alive. The prints—both Hujar’s originals and the recent ones by co-curator Gary Schneider—possess a powerful aura that allows them to transcend their time while also being essential documents of the era. I am even tempted to make a pilgrimage to Bonn next year to see the show a third time.
Read my interview with the exhibition’s co-curator, and Peter Hujar’s biographer, John Douglas Millar.
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The paradox of memorability is that almost anything can stick in the mind if you dedicate enough attention. Even the act of photographing an event helps solidify it in one’s mental archive. It is no coincidence that half of the things I’ve listed here were ones I documented. So be it. What we pay attention to is what makes up a life. Here’s to more memorable cultural experiences in 2026.
From Peter Hujar’s indelible portraits of 1970s counterculture to Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women of the 1980s, here are 10 of the most timeless and inspirational photo series published on Dazed last year
Cookie Mueller. Image courtesy of the Estate of David Armstrong
This shortlist encompasses the most inspirational photography stories by some of the most revered image-makers we’ve published on Dazed this year. From Kikuji Kawada’s visions of Hiroshima to Daniel Arnold’s gaze on New York in the anarchic present, they span many decades, yet all share a timeless quality.
Peter Hujar’s portraits from the late 1960s through to he early 1980s testify to the fact that great art can remain as resonant and meaningful as ever, while Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2024 series of images possesses a timeless, haunting quality that makes it hard to pin down to a particular decade.
What is equally apparent is how artists’ fierce connections to their subjects powerfully draw us in. There are Linder’s humorous but pointedly critical collages, the revival of Sophy Rickett’s thrilling and defiant Pissing Women, a glimpse into the 90s by way of Davide Sorrenti’s era-defining sketches and Polaroids, and David Armstrong’s indelible portraits of friends Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller – none of which have dimmed one bit despite the passing of time.
The past is potent. It makes our turbulent reality feel part of a wider narrative. Seeing artists who’ve gone before us representing beauty and hard times alike, we’re reassured that inevitably the pendulum will swing back again. The world is heavy, but those who channel that fact into memorable aesthetics and worthwhile chronicles give us a sense of hope we so badly need. Enjoy.
Despite not having been recognised in his lifetime, this year seems to have been a landmark year in the legacy of Peter Hujar. His life is the subject of a new film, Peter Hujar’s Day, a biographical drama starring Ben Whishaw, written and directed by Ira Sachs; a new photo book, Stay Away From Nothing, about his relationship with Paul Theck was released by Primary Information; and the year opened with a major exhibition, Eyes Open in the Dark, at London’s Raven Row. Fran Lebowitz to Divine and Peter Wojnarowicz, the depth and weight of his portraits of New York’s outré figures and downtown art world figures still resonate as powerfully today as ever.
Raven Row, London One of the great photographers of the late 20th century, and now the subject of Ira Sachs’s 2025 movie Peter Hujar’s Day starring Ben Whishaw, Peter Hujar’s relentless, beautifully shot black-and-white photographs filled Raven Row early this year. This revelatory show brought out Hujar’s curiosity and his unerring eye, his darkroom skills and his utter seriousness. Rolleiflex camera always in hand, Hujar captured human vulnerabilities and vanities, including his own, a prickly artist, shunning fame. New York wreathed in fog, light on the river, life and death: his subjects had no end. My show of the year.
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Charlotte Jansen’s best UK photography shows of the year
Raven Row, London Putrid, petrifying, and vertiginously beautiful, this museum-quality exhibition threw you into the decaying, dank urban streets of downtown New York, but also lifted you to moments of dizzying euphoria and perfect grace. A sharp, feeling, and sublime account of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. Unforgettable.
The highly acclaimed show at Raven Row, London, is traveling to the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany! The Bundeskunsthalle begins its 2026 exhibition year with an exhibition on one of New York’s most important photographers, Peter Hujar, who was celebrated for the empathy and warmth of his images, yet was little known during his lifetime. Hujar’s primary interest was portrait photography, photographing himself, his friends, and residents of New York’s downtown queer scene, but he also turned his attention to animals, architecture, and landscapes.
The exhibition was organized by Raven Row, London, and the Peter Hujar Foundation. In partnership with the Bundeskunsthalle, the Gropius Bau, Berlin, presents Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision from March 19 to June 28, 2026.
Celebrating more than 30 years of collection, Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish pays tribute to the passion of Sir Elton John and David Furnish for photography reflecting both their personal taste and unique look as collectors. Selected from their collection of more than 7000 images, the photographs presented are iconic images that explore the connection between the force and vulnerability inherent in the human condition.
Recounting a history of modern and contemporary photography, the exhibition will bring together an exceptional selection of the world’s most important photographers with works dating back to the present day from 1950. Adapted from the exhibition presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum between May 2024 and January 2025, the course will explore, through five thematic sections, topics such as desire, fashion, celebrities and photojournalism. Artists featured include Robert Mapplethorpe, Harley Weir, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Ai Weiwei, Herbert List, and many others, as well as a monumental installation of 149 Nan Goldin prints from his Thanksgiving series.
Commissioners: Duncan Forbes, Newell Harbin and Lydia Caston. Exhibition produced by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Bringing together the works of Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes, Persistence of Vision opens an intergenerational dialogue on photography. Working in New York City between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Peter Hujar captured a pivotal cultural moment in piercing black-and-white photographs. Alongside incisive images of animals, nature and urban ruins, he portrayed New York’s downtown avant-garde and queer communities, including figures such as Candy Darling, Susan Sontag and David Wojnarowicz. In the exhibition, Hujar’s photographs are interspersed with contemporary works by New York City-based artist Liz Deschenes. These interludes invite viewers to pause, slow down and consider Hujar’s work in a new light. Deschenes creates sculptures and non-representational photographic works that employ the fundamental properties of the medium – light, chemistry and time – to explore what a photograph can be. As the first major exhibition of both Hujar’s and Deschenes’ work in Berlin, Persistence of Vision proposes an expansive understanding of photography and highlights the uncompromising clarity of vision that defines both artists’ practices.
Curated by Eva Respini, Co-CEO and Curator at Large, Vancouver Art Gallery, with Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino, Curatorial Fellow Exhibitions, Gropius Bau
In partnership with Gropius Bau, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn presents Peter Hujar. Eyes Open in the Dark from 27 February to 23 August 2026.
