Underrated master photographer Peter Hujar gets his due in S.F. show and new film
By Tony Bravo published 5 October 2025 in San Francisco Chronicle
Peter Hujar’s photographs are haunting, glamorous, gorgeously grotesque, emotionally devastating and above all, honest.
Now, Bay Area audiences have a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of this under-sung master of 20th century photography.
With “Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited,” the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco is recreating a now-legendary 1986 show in New York’s East Village presented by gallerist Gracie Mansion. The 70 photographs include portraits of friends, artists and dogs; nudes; landscapes; scenes of decaying abandoned buildings; and images of animals, living and dead.
“What became obvious to me, living with this show, was that everything was a portrait,” Mansion said in a discussion about the work for Fraenkel Gallery, highlighting how Hujar brought that point of view even to inanimate objects and scenes.
The Fraenkel presentation reproduces the original exhibition layout and even includes some prints from the 1986 show.
Hujar died a year after that exhibition, on Nov. 26, 1987, of complications from the AIDS virus that was devastating the queer and artistic communities. He was 53 years old.
In a perfect bit of synchronicity, on Friday-Saturday, Oct. 10-11, the Mill Valley Film Festival is screening the new film “Peter Hujar’s Day” written and directed by Ira Sachs. It stars Ben Whishaw as the photographer and Rebecca Hall as writer Linda Rosenkranz, Hujar’s oldest friend.
The film is based on Rosenkranz’s book of the same name, in which she interviewed Hujar solely about what he had done the previous day, Dec. 18, 1974. In the course of the film, Hujar recounts both the extraordinary and the mundane, from photographing poet Allen Ginsberg to daydreaming about the man ahead of him in line at a Chinese restaurant.
When I met Hujar’s friend and executor Stephen Koch at the Fraenkel Gallery show opening, he said that Whishaw absolutely captured Hujar’s voice in his performance. Watching the movie, one has the sense that the actor was both channeling the real Hujar and also giving such an idiosyncratic, specific performance with each gesture that he was creating something as artistically original as the photographer’s own work. You get the same feeling from the film — Hujar’s great, candid gossip, asides and his recall of details — as you do the book.
…The work on view at Fraenkel Gallery through Oct. 25 feels as intimate as “Peter Hujar’s Day” book and film, with the curation mixing images of life and death. “David Wojnarowicz: Manhattan-Night (III)” (1985) shows the artist who was also Hujar’s lover and friend in close up, his full lips sensual, every freckle on his face realized. Hujar’s portrait of his acquaintance Bob Berg (1985) shows his mastery of lighting and shadow, a skill likely honed in a 1967 master class he took with photographers Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. I’m obsessed with the definition of Berg’s curls in the photo and the single light catching hair across his forehead.
…But it is the deterioration shown in the abandoned rooms and buildings as well as dead animal photos that give the work bite. There’s a sense of inevitable finality in many of these photos, particularly “Jackie Curtis Is Dead” (1985), which shows the Warhol star laid out in an open casket.
These works, and the new film, are poignant reminders that Hujar was an artist taken too soon.
Full article in San Francisco Chronicle
Get tickets to Mill Valley Film Festival screening Peter Hujar’s Day October 10 and October 11
Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited is on view until October 25, 2025 at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco