Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar was born at Trenton in New Jersey in 1934, spent his early childhood on his grandparents' farm, and was photographing seriously by his teens. After apprenticeships with commercial studios and a spell in fashion work in the 1960s, he left the magazines for the artists, writers, performers and friends of downtown New York: Candy Darling on her deathbed, Susan Sontag lying back with her hands behind her head, William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, and David Wojnarowicz, first his lover and then his closest friend. He photographed farm animals, the West Side piers and derelict buildings with the same attention. His one book in his lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death, appeared in 1976 with an introduction by Sontag. He died of AIDS-related illness in 1987.

Lifetime and posthumous prints are the division that matters. Hujar was a meticulous printer who made his own gelatin silver prints, and those are comparatively scarce and sometimes signed or annotated. After his death the Peter Hujar Archive authorised prints made from his negatives, which carry the estate's stamp and are a different object from a print he made himself, even of the same image. Print date, paper, stamps and inscriptions need reading together. Many lifetime prints are modest in size and on papers that mark easily, so surface condition, silvering and old mounting damage are the practical concerns. The Peter Hujar Archive in New York is the reference.