A new edition of the cult classic photography book by the legendary Peter Hujar. “I am moved by the purity of [Hujar’s] intentions.... These memento mori can exorcise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic.” —Susan Sontag Portraits in Life and Death is the only book of photographs published by Peter Hujar during his lifetime. The twenty-nine portraits of creative people—ranging from William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and John Waters to Larry Ree, founder of the Trocadero Gloxinia Ballet Company, and T.C. (whose identity is unclear)—possess a haunting beauty and degree of psychological examination that is both offbeat and riveting. Following the portraits come eleven images that can only be described as devastating: pictures of semi-preserved, clothed bodies of nineteenth-century Sicilians found in the arid catacombs beneath a church in Palermo. There is no necessary connection in the photographs themselves or between the two sections of the book, yet the pictorial progression from life to death is an emblem of the journey we all take. The living subjects seem to be meditating on the mortality that is limned with such profound effect in the catacomb pictures. In different ways, both groups of images speak to the basic fears and emotions that we carry with us, somewhere beyond our consciousness. After viewing this extraordinary book, it is almost impossible not to make those connections and interpretations or be moved by Hujar’s consistent ability to convey what appears to be the inner spirit of his subjects. Even so, an air of nonchalance, even gaiety, hovers over the photographs. The book is odd, oblique, sometimes opaque, and certainly deeply felt; but it sticks to the mind like a burr. It will be noticed. Once seen, it cannot be forgotten.

Celebrated and revered by artists, the work of Peter Hujar remains something of a public secret, but his photographs dealing with sex and eroticism, made between the years 1969 and 1986, have come to define a certain era in New York. Today they are widely considered to be his finest and most radical work. Hujar's view of the human body is uninhibited and uncompromising, but his poignant explorations of sexuality and desire also project a universal humanity; as Nan Goldin said of Hujar's nudes, "Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh." This monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, is the first to deal specifically with Hujar's photographs of love and lust. Captured in deeply textured black and white, these photographs present a view of human relationships that encompasses both the tender and taboo. This volume also contains an interview with author Fran Lebowitz from 1989, and newly commissioned essays by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch. Peter Hujar(1934-1987) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene of downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976, he published Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987.

Peter Hujar was an influential figure of the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and '80s, most well-known for his photographs of male nudes, and his portraits of New York City's artists, musicians, writers, and performers, including Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol. Over 160 photographs and illustrations are now gathered in Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. Published alongside a major touring exhibition, this collection presents Hujar's famous portraiture as well as his lesser-known projects.

The Shabbiness of Beauty' is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar's archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City, even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania, these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey's self-aware postmodernism against Hujar's humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other's work.--

In 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did on the day of December 18. The following day, Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street. She asked him in detail about the happenings of December 18 and tape-recorded their conversation. This book is a full transcript of that exchange, published for the first time since it was recorded 47 years ago.

It's a vanished world, and Peter Hujar was right there in it. The Lower East Side between 1972 and 1985 - filled with artists, wannabe artists and hangers-on - was a community of the misbegotten gathered from every town in America and relocated in the mean streets between Broadway and the Bowery. Nothing but their talent, their flamboyance, their rank gender-bending mockery and their arch irony supported them. Some made their names. Many came to grief. A few made art. In those days, the gutted streets of the Lower East Side looked like a war zone. Everyone lived and worked on the extreme outer margins of money and art, penniless and unknown. As a community, Downtown was a counterstatement to the rich New York of the banks, museums, media, corporations ... and the art world itself. That Downtown is forever gone. Time, gentrification, disease and death have taken their toll and turned this vibrant epoch into a chapter of art history. But before it vanished, its extravagant cast sat for Peter Hujar's camera - and is now alive again in front of our eyes. Featured among others: Joe Brainard, William Burroughs, Remy Charlip, Edwin Denby, Divine, Ray Johnson, Fran Lebowitz, Charles Ludlum, Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, John Waters, Robert Wilson, David Wojnarowicz.

Peter Hujar, a New Yorker of Ukrainian descent, died of AIDS in 1987. He recorded the world in astonishing portraits of cows, sheep, and geese in the country, dogs in the studio, the sea, the city, and above all his fellow human beings, many of whom have since won fame: Susan Sontag, John Waters, Divine, William S. Borroughs, Candy Darling, Robert Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, Paul Thek, and many men, in the nude, half-dressed, sleeping, posing, tumescent. People, animals, landscapes - Peter Hujar approached them all with great respect and a perfect sense of balance between near and far. His subjects face us with supremely dignified singularity, with loneliness at times, and at times in an aura of dauntless and "splendid isolation".