New Exhibition Reveals the Creative Process Behind Peter Hujar’s Photography

Hujar:Contact

 

May 22-October 25, 2026

Morgan Library & Museum

 

Contact sheet: Self Portraits. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York/ Contact sheet: Susan Sontag. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York

 

New York, NY (April 9, 2026) – This spring, the Morgan Library & Museum will present Hujar:Contact, an exhibition exploring the life, times, and creative evolution of photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987). On view from May 22 through October 25, 2026, the exhibition features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from the Morgan’s collection of Peter Hujar’s works.

 

Highlights include portraits of artists and performers such as Marsha P. Johnson, Jackie Curtis, Patti Smith, Candy Darling, John Zorn, and Ethyl Eichelberger, as well as Hujar’s creative collaborators and lovers, including Paul Thek, Joseph Raffael, and David Wojnarowicz. Hujar’s distinctive portraiture, alongside rare prints of his street photography, interiors, and landscapes, reveals the unflinching eye he cast upon a vast range of subjects.

 

In 2013, the Morgan acquired the 5,783 black-and-white contact sheets Hujar possessed at the time of his death, along with two notebooks, or “job books,” in which he recorded his photographic assignments and personal projects from 1954 until 1985. Together, these materials provide a detailed record of an artist who left no written reflection on his work, yet carefully preserved the traces of his decades-long photographic life. Hujar:Contact foregrounds the material processes that structured photographic practice in the era of film and chemical printing. Visitors to the exhibition will be transported to Hujar’s darkroom, invited to study these small images with the same attentiveness and care that Hujar himself brought to them. 

 

“Following our 2018 exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, which explored the full length and breadth of Hujar’s artistic career for the first time, Hujar:Contact turns to his creative process,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “This exhibition advances the Morgan’s commitment to collecting and interpreting contemporary photography and to broadening appreciation for a medium that is both immediate and reflective.”

 

The exhibition elevates the contact sheet, traditionally a working tool, into an art object worthy of close visual reading in its own right. Each sheet reproduces an entire roll of film, allowing viewers to follow Hujar’s eye through a series of exposures. Many of the contact sheets include Hujar’s own handwritten notes, marks, and annotations, which indicate his changing approach to cropping and printing and elucidate the editorial decisions behind each final image.

 

“Contact sheets reveal an intimate history of Hujar’s habits, inspirations, and happy accidents—the intricacies hidden behind a final print,” said Joel Smith, curator of the exhibition and Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography at the Morgan. 

 

“Hujar:Contact illuminates the physical process that was central to his artistic practice.”

 

Reproduced at large scale on the walls are dozens of pages from Hujar’s job books, which provide the closest thing to a chronological account of his career. The earliest surviving page dates to 1954, when Hujar was just beginning to photograph friends and loved ones in New York. Over the following decades, the notebooks grew into a numbered record of hundreds of shoots, following the artist from his job as a studio assistant in the 1950s to his work in fashion and music journalism in the late 1960s, and ultimately to the independent portrait practice that defined his mature work in downtown New York.

 

By the mid-1970s, Hujar had become a central figure in the cultural life of New York’s East Village. Working primarily with a medium-format camera that allowed him to maintain eye contact with his sitters, Hujar

cultivated an atmosphere in which photographer and subject shaped the image together. Visitors will gain a vivid sense of this collaborative process through the presentation of contact sheets alongside never-before-exhibited prints, unveiling how individual portraits emerged from a giveand-take process grounded in patience and mutual curiosity

 

Programs

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of programs, including Morgan After Hours: Pride on June 11; a panel discussion, “Remembering Peter Hujar,” with Gary Schneider, Vince Aletti, and Fran Lebowitz, moderated by curator Joel Smith, on June 24; and an online Closer Look program on Hujar’s contact sheets with Joel Smith, Olivia McCall, and Marcelo Gabriel Yanez on July 29.

 

About the Morgan Library & Museum

A museum and independent research library located in the heart of New York City, the Morgan Library & Museum began as the personal library of financier, collector, and cultural benefactor Pierpont Morgan. The Morgan offers visitors close encounters with great works of human accomplishment in a setting treasured for its intimate scale and historic significance. Its collection of manuscripts, rare books, music, drawings, and works of art comprises a unique and dynamic record of civilization, as well as an incomparable repository of ideas and of the creative process from 4000 BC to the present.

 

 

*피터 후자: 삶의 속도(Peter Hujar: Speed of Life)@모건라이브러리, 2018

https://www.nyculturebeat.com/?mid=Art2&document_srl=3725102

*컨택트 시트(contact sheet, proof sheet): 필름 한롤이나 사진 촬영에서 나온 모든 프레임의 썸네일 크기 이미지를 격자 형태로 배열한 사진 인쇄물 또는 디지털 문서로 인쇄 또는 추가 처리에 사용할 최상의 이미지를 신속하게 검토, 편집 및 선택하는 데 사용되는 마스터 인덱스 역할을 한다.