The great queer photographer PETER HUJAR is celebrated in an exhibit and a film in 2025, 38 years after his death

Peter Hujar  was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits which reflected his homosexual milieu. He was an influential artist-activist of the gay liberation movement; in 1969, with his lover, the political activist Jim Fouratt, he witnessed the Stonewall riots in the West Village.  In early 1981, Hujar met the young artist David Wojnarowicz, and after a brief period as Hujar’s lover, Wojnarowicz became a protégé linked to Hujar for the remainder of the photographer’s life.  Another artist closely linked with Hujar is Robert Mapplethorpe. Both artists were gay white men who excelled at portrait photography and who made unashamedly homoerotic work that walked the line between pornography and fine art, but they were structural opposites. 

The sad thing is Hujar’s work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime (he died of AIDS in 1987 aged 53) but he has since been recognized as a major American photographer of the 1970s and 80s.  Last year alone there were two major Hujar exhibitions  : one at the Ukranian Museum in NY, and the other at the Venice Biennale.  

2025 looks to being no different with a new exhibition in London : Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark but there will also be the highly anticipated film “Peter Hujar’s Day” from Teddy Award winning writer/director Ira Sachs and starring three-time BAFTA winner Ben Whishaw. 

The exhibition currently on at Raven Row, London includes Hujar’s most well-known shot, his beautiful and melancholy portrait of Warhol “superstar” Candy Darling in repose on her deathbed. She is surrounded by flowers, a single rose lying by her side. Made in 1973 at her request, it is an artfully staged collaboration with, as Hujar later put it, “Candy playing every death scene in every movie”.   There are also some of his best work at the “historic crossroads of high art and lowlife” that was downtown New York in the 1970s. Many of the portraits here reflect that heady era of creative experimentation, whether of the famous – Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, John Waters, Fran Lebowitz – or the less well known, which include many of Hujar’s friends and acquaintances from the New York gay scene of the time including his one time boyfriend  David Wojnarowicz

His self-portraits tend towards the more straightforward or archly mischievous and  even sometimes hardcore. ‘The Guardian’ sums it all up so perfectly  “Eyes Open in the Dark  reaffirms the beautiful and melancholy genius of Hujar, a towering 20th-century artist whose time has finally come.”

Ira Sachs film that just premiered at Sundance is about a kind of documentary nonfiction project undertaken by author Linda Rosenkrantz, in which Hujar simply came to her apartment and recounted into a tape machine everything that happened to him on a certain day.

The tape is lost, but the typescript survived, published three years ago as Peter Hujar’s Day and now filmed by director Ira Sachs as a verbatim-cinema chamber piece entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment, sometimes in different rooms or pensively up on the roof looking out at the skyline, shot to make it look like it was filmed on 16mm at the time, with ungainly cuts, and scratches on the print.

Rebecca Hall plays Rosenkrantz, asking questions and listening with a continuous air of alert, slightly quizzical and sympathetic amusement. Ben Whishaw is Hujar himself, telling her about a day which he considered quite boring, but was (he now realises) crowded with incident.

The film will probably have a limited appeal even though itis helmed by Sachs and stars one of the finest queer actors if his generation, but nevertheless as it covers an important player in queer history, it will be a must-see for us .  It is expected to be released later in 2025