In ‘Peter Hujar’s Day,’ a Quiet Conversation Reveals a Bold Artistic Life
Director Ira Sachs on how “a reclaimed conversation between two friends” sheds light on the late photographer
By Min Chen published November 7, 2025 on Art Net
In all, Peter Hujar lived a brief 19,401 days. For most of those days, his unblinking eye was alive to the world. Countless more days, he spent capturing people and places in images of intense depth and beauty. But only one of those days has been documented with exquisite clarity.
In the winter of 1974, Hujar visited his friend Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment. At her request, he had made notes about what he did the day before—December 18, a Wednesday—and began relating it to her. His account was to be included in the writer’s new project documenting how various people remembered a day in their life (Chuck Close was another interviewee). The photographer spared no detail as he told Rosenkrantz what he did, who he met, what he ate, how he felt, what he wore, and how many naps he took. “I didn’t do anything,” he admits at one point. His narrative begs to differ.
That one day now forms the heart of Peter Hujar’s Day, a new film by director Ira Sachs, hot off his 2023 movie Passages. Sachs, however, has not recreated Hujar’s day scene for scene, but rather, the retelling of his day—essentially the very long conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz, played by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. What compelled the filmmaker was the rapport and shared language that transpired in the pair’s dialogue, as much as its content.
“All I ever want is intimacy and authenticity,” Sachs told me over a video call. “It’s all there.”
Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs. Photo courtesy of Janus Films.
Rosenkrantz’s broader day-in-the-life project was never realized. The original transcript of her interview with Hujar was donated in 2019 to New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, home to a large repository of the photographer’s work. In 2021, it was published by Magic Hour Press in a compact volume, which Sachs encountered in a gay bookstore while filming Passages in Paris.
In the book, the director, who admits to owning “almost every Hujar monograph,” saw a new picture of Hujar emerge. He also saw his next project, one that was small but revealing, contained yet vast.
“I wasn’t interested in making a film about Peter Hujar. I was interested in the text that Linda Rosenkrantz created about this afternoon she had with Peter Hujar—this conversation between two friends that had been reclaimed,” he explained, adding of its cosy scale: “I embrace the magnitude of the minimal.”
The Day After Peter Hujar’s Day
While Rosenkrantz’s text effectively served as a readymade script (with some light tinkering from Sachs), translating it into a visual, temporal medium called for considerations of set and setting. Sachs first thought to film Peter and Linda’s conversation in real-time before abandoning the idea as it seemed too static: “This was setting myself up for a catastrophe,” he thought.
He almost scrapped the entire project six weeks out from shooting until he checked out Jim McBride’s 1969 documentary My Girlfriend’s Wedding. That film centers solely on McBride’s then-lover Clarissa Ainley confessing to the camera her reasons for marrying another man. The cuts in that movie, Sachs said, were much like those in Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), representing jumps in time and location, much like an ellipse.
“The ellipse becomes the nature of movement,” he said. “The ellipse gave me permission to adjust my understanding of the film to one that would abstractly move through time, based on decisions I made as a filmmaker.”
In Peter Hujar’s Day, we see Peter and Linda converse in her living room, her kitchen, her terrace, and her bed—all of it shot on 16mm film at a split-level apartment at Westbeth Artists Housing. The change in locations marks the passage of time, but so do their movements. Linda boils water to brew tea; Peter lights a cigarette then later, retrieves a new pack from his coat hanging by the door. They’re gestures that inject dynamism into the scenes, forming an almost choreographed dance to background the conversation. In a way, Sachs said, it’s almost “an action film.”
But, he added, it’s also “a film that’s a sequence of portraits of subjects in space and in light.”
Whishaw and Hall’s portrayals are lived-in ones; their back-and-forth belying an easy camaraderie. While Whishaw took to ingesting 55 pages worth of dialogue that exemplified what he called Hujar’s “obsessiveness,” Hall turned to the real-life Rosenkrantz, now 91, to nail her open-heartedness and clear love for the artist. “When I spoke to Linda, it was just so apparent how much she adored him,” Hall said in production notes. “And looking at photographs of the two of them from the time, you could see the intimacy there.” (Sachs called Rosenkrantz a “fairy godmother” to the film.)
Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs. Photo courtesy of Janus Films.
The Person Behind the Camera
What surfaces during the course of Hujar and Rosenkrantz’s exchange, of course, are more than the banal details of his one day. “The things that happen over the course of this day are quite small things,” Whishaw reflected in production notes, “but they nonetheless speak somehow about who he was.”
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Hujar’s warmth toward his friend shows up (Rosenkrantz, in turn, worries about his eating and smoking habits), as does his unsurprising ability to color in a scene. His dry humor crackles. At one point, he complains at length about Ed Baynard, an artist he calls “totally insane,” who is prone to tying him up on the phone. He tells Rosenkrantz of her project, “If this ever gets printed, I hope it’s printed with his name.”
“Anything that adds to Peter’s reputation as an important photographer gives me pleasure,” Rosenkrantz said in production notes. “Peter died penniless and only known among a certain group of people. I think that hearing his voice, so to speak, in the book and in the film really tells people who he was.”
Sachs himself discovered Hujar in the late ’80s, via a show at Matthew Marks gallery (the director doesn’t own a work by Hujar, he said, but Whishaw does). To him, Hujar creates portraits the same way the author Henry James crafts his novels. “They have that depth and narrative quality. They’re technically exquisite,” he explained. “They bring majesty to a subculture that I feel connected to and I want more of. They make major the marginalized in a way that gives me strength.”
That ethos is borne out in Sachs’s own work—from his intimate portrayal of domestic tensions in Little Men (2016) to Keep the Lights On (2012) and Passages, which fix a humanistic lens on the queer experience. His immersion in Hujar’s oeuvre is such that, he said, “I think Peter and a whole group of artists from the East Village have become my ancestors. I live in relationship with them and I make work in relationship with them.”
Seeing the other side of the camera in Peter Hujar’s Day and glimpsing the photographer behind the photograph—even, and especially, with all his raw edges—struck another, deep chord.
“The gift of this text is how much Peter reveals his vulnerabilities as an artist,” he said. “He shares narratively how hard it is to make art. I find that very comforting because you’re like, ‘You too, Peter Hujar?’”
Peter Hujar’s Day is in theaters now.