Peter Hujar
Palermo Catacombs #9 (priest)
Palermo Catacombs #9 (priest), 1963
From Katakomben, Palermo
Gelatin-silver print, 39.2 x 39.4 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift Richard Brintzenhofe
1993-011-008
© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC
1934 (Trenton, US) – 1987 (New York, US)
Peter Hujar chronicled New York’s underground and queer scene in the Manhattan of the 1960s and 1970s. After studying at the School of Industrial Art, Hujar took part in fashion photographer Richard Avedon’s master class; subsequently, on Avedon’s recommendation, he began working for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. The technical precision of commercial studio photography can also be seen in the work Hujar did on his own account, which became his main focus in the late 1960s. Drawing on his circle of friends and acquaintances, he went on to make portraits of artists, writers, performers and drag queens, including Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz, often in intimate and quiet moments. In 1976 he published some of these images, along with photographs from the catacombs of Palermo, in a photobook titled Portraits in Life and Death, for which Susan Sontag supplied the foreword. However, the photographer’s sensitive, pared-down black-and-white images, which now feature in numerous museum collections, garnered little attention during his lifetime. Hujar died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987 in New York.