Artist

Peter Hujar

1934–1987

39 works in the collection 18 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

During the period from the early 1970s, when he left the field of commercial photography in which he had worked for two decades, until his death, Peter Hujar produced a poignant body of black- and-white photographic work. His themes encompassed landscapes, interiors, and still lifes, but he is best known for his portraiture. In his East Village loft, Hujar documented the artists, writers, musicians, and performers of the era’s demimonde in moments of repose and candor. Some subjects are unknown, and others eminent—among them Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, and Hujar’s partner, the artist David Wojnarowicz. Without a trace of pretense or artifice, Hujar captures something of each sitter’s essence or personality. This intimacy is rendered all the more affecting by the elegant formal precision of his compositions, which often evoke classical sources.

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed pictures the transgender actress Candy Darling, a downtown denizen and member of Andy Warhol’s coterie who was a muse to artists and musicians. Hujar shot this photograph of Darling in bed at a Manhattan hospital shortly before her death in 1974, at the age of twenty-nine, from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Ringed by flowers, she appears at once resigned and serene, her fragile beauty still intact; as the philosopher of art Arthur Danto wrote, Hujar “has photographed her the way she would have wanted to be shown.” Mortality and death would become more explicit concerns in Hujar’s work in the 1980s as many of his friends and fellow artists suffered from HIV; in 1987 he died of an AIDS-related illness.