Contact High

Nolan Kelly on Hujar:Contact at the Morgan Library

This essay is the first of our new series, CRIT. Between issues of Starters, we’re commissioning top art, architecture, design, film, and culture critics to bring new words to what’s fresh in New York and beyond to your inbox.

Hujar contact sheet capturing Jackie Curtis in drag (1970). Image courtesy the Morgan Library.

By the time of his death in 1987, Peter Hujar was still largely unknown outside the artistic and intellectual circles he photographed, but he’d long imagined his work would outlive him. “I want to be discussed in hushed tones,” he told a friend as he was nearing the end of his life, “When people talk about me, I want them to be whispering.” Some four decades later, he seems to have gotten his wish, as major museum exhibitions, photobooks, and even an indie biopic—Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), which premiered at New York Film Festival last fall—collectively make the argument that Hujar is one of the past century’s most arresting photographers, shamefully underappreciated in his day.

Hujar contact sheet, the Hudson River (Courtesy the Morgan Library)

Now Hujar:Contact, the Morgan Library’s exhibition of the artist’s “job books” and contact sheets, attempts to reconcile Hujar’s belief in his own legacy with his posthumous fervor through an ingenious curatorial conceit: sharing the components of Hujar’s working process as works in themselves.