PETER HUJAR (1934-1987)
Forbidden Fruit, David Wojnarowicz Eating an Apple, 1983
Print in Colors
5 3/4" x 7 1/4"
Peter Hujar was an influential American photographer. He worked in black-and-white portraiture, often portraying his friends and acquaintances in an intimate or sexually suggestive settings. “His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way,” the photographer Nan Goldin once wrote. “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. His photographs of animals have that same rare empathy, they are like highly personal portraits.” Born on October 11, 1934 in Trenton, NJ, Hujar struggled through a difficult childhood marked by abandonment, and went on to work in the field of commercial photography before joining the burgeoning downtown art scene in New York. Making contact with Andy Warhol and befriending several important art world figures like Susan Sontag, Candy Darling, and his partner David Wojnarowicz, Hujar created a seminal body of work throughout the 1970s and 80s. Portraits in Life and Death is his best-known book of prints, combining photographs of his friends with those taken during a Fulbright grant trip documenting the dead in the Palermo catacombs of southern Italy. Death was consistently a theme in Hujar's work, a subject he explored until his death from AIDS-related complications on November 26, 1987, after which his dead body was touchingly photographed one final time by his partner.

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