‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Demystifies the Working Artist
Ira Sachs’s absorbing biopic balances monotony with glory in the life of the cult photographer
By Rachel Pronger published 30 October 2025 for Frieze
How do you spend your days? How much time do you dedicate to eating, sleeping, working, wandering? Thanks to Linda Rosenkrantz, we know how Peter Hujar spent at least one of his. On Wednesday 18 December 1974, the photographer received a call instructing him to record everything he did that day. Rosenkrantz, a writer, had started a project in which she planned to document how her friends – fellow artists in New York’s downtown scene – spent a single day. On Thursday, Rosenkrantz invited Hujar to her apartment to tape a granular discussion of his every nap, sandwich and phone call in the past 24 hours.
Rosenkrantz’s project soon lost momentum and the interview was never published during Hujar’s lifetime. It wasn’t until the late-2010s that Rosenkrantz discovered a transcript of their conversation in her filing cabinet. She donated the document to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and in 2022 the transcript was reproduced as a book by Magic Hour Press.
Now, filmmaker Ira Sachs has turned that interview into an experimental feature. Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) is a quietly eccentric two-hander starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as Hujar and Rosenkrantz, set almost entirely in one apartment and shot on flickering 16mm film. Across 76 quietly magnetic minutes, the pair drink tea, lounge on a sofa or bed as Whishaw’s Hujar delivers a blow-by-blow account of the previous day – from the chiming of his alarm clock to the late night shouts of sex workers outside his window.
Superficially, Sachs’s film appears to be an extension of the evolving cult of Hujar. Over the past decade, the photographer has been transformed from niche concern to art-world canon, buoyed partially by surging interest in AIDs-era artists such as Leigh Bowery, Nan Goldin and David Woznajowicz, and a growing hunger for revisionist queer histories. Hujar’s ascension to the top tier of 20th-century photographers has been recently confirmed in a flurry of notable shows. This year, in London, there was a presentation of his backstage nightclub and cabaret portraits by Pace at Frieze Masters; Raven Row’s show at the start of the year, ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’, spans the artist’s career. Across the Atlantic, Fraenkel Gallery recreated the Hujar’s groundbreaking 1986 exhibition in ‘The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited’ (2025) and the Ukrainian Museum in New York unveiled rarely seen portraits in ‘Peter Hujar: Rialto’ (2024).
This reappraisal is merited, but at times a fascination with the artist’s social milieu and famous friends risks flattening the rougher edges of Hujar’s life – his tough upbringing, financial precarity and volatile personality. While Sachs’s film doesn’t touch on the latter, what it does capture brilliantly is the tedious glamour of life as a working artist. Extraordinary incidents – a photoshoot with Allen Ginsberg, a phone call from Susan Sontag – are given equal weight as discussions of sleep schedules (two naps a day) and eating habits (rye sandwiches, cheap Chinese dinners). Hujar lists the fees of upcoming assignments and frets about money, while gossiping about his acquaintances (‘Nicky, the guy who does anal paintings!’) and moaning about his worsening eyesight.
Many of the details in Hujar’s day are familiar to any creative freelancer. To be a working artist might mean the odd glamorous encounter, but it also means precarious pay, simple food and the monotonous grind of ‘doing the work’. On that fateful Wednesday, Hujar had laboured into the early hours but the results left him disappointed. The prints he produced were ‘quite ordinary’ he informs Rosenkrantz, much to his chagrin.
Where other artist biopics lead with passion and inspiration, Sachs’s offers anxiety, fatigue and ordinariness. Hujar worries that ‘nothing much happens’ in his days; his late night overworking a symptom of the fear of squandered time. Yet, he acknowledges ‘sometimes I just have to stand and stare’ to find deeper meaning in his images. What drove Hujar to keep creating despite his frustrations is the same thing that makes Sachs’s audience continue watching despite the tedium; it’s those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments of being in the presence of something – or someone – greater than yourself.
The conceit of Peter Hujar’s Day is that making art is boring, that being an artist is boring. But I am not sure Sachs truly believes this. As shifting shards of light stream through the windows, Whishaw and Hall are momentarily transformed – beatific – and, for a few fragile seconds, something special becomes fleetingly, gloriously visible: even an ordinary human day can be incandescent.
Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day has its theatrical release in North America on 7 November 2025 and the UK/Ireland on 2 January 2026