Hujar, Peter, 1934-1987, Contact sheet: Gary Schneider at 189 Nude, 2013.108:8.3611. All photos courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum.
5783 Photographs Peter Hujar Thought No One Would Ever See
By Emily Sandstrom
May 22, 2026
Peter Hujar kept every contact sheet he ever made, perhaps because he never stopped believing someone would eventually come looking for them. Over the course of his lifetime, he shot Patti Smith, Candy Darling, David Wojnarowicz, and Susan Sontag, becoming a central figure in the cultural life of downtown New York without ever quite becoming famous. He was, as curator Joel Smith puts it, missing “the gene for self-promotion.” Though assured of his own genius, he was largely ignored beyond his homestead in the East Village. This spring, the Morgan Library & Museum makes the case for what Hujar always knew. Hujar: Contact draws from the archive of over 5,783 contact sheets Hujar preserved until his death in 1987. The show also arrives at the moment of a Hujar revival: Ira Sachs‘s biographical film Peter Hujar’s Day introduced him to audiences well beyond the art world, while Andrew Durbin‘s new biography wrestles with his chaotic personal life. The contact sheet was never meant to be artwork but rather a working object, a way for film photographers to see what they’d shot before committing to a full print. But Hujar’s sheets are something else: each one a full roll of film reduced to thumbnail-sized frames, marked up in oil pencil, annotated with the thinking he otherwise left unrecorded. Smith calls them “an intimate history of Hujar’s habits, inspirations, and happy accidents.” More than 110 works are now on view through October 25th, with a selection (including some exclusives) shown below.
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