Peter Hujar valuation
Photographed downtown New York's artists, animals and ruins with the stillness of a formal portrait.
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.
What a work by Peter Hujar is worth
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Bio
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.
Italy, Paul Thek and the estate
Hujar got his first camera in 1947 and entered the School of Industrial Art in 1953, where the poet Daisy Aldan encouraged him. In 1958 he went to Italy with the painter Joseph Raffael, and in 1963 he returned on his own Fulbright with Paul Thek, photographing the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo.
He was diagnosed with AIDS in January 1987 and died that November, aged 53. He left his estate to his friend the writer Stephen Koch, who administered it until his death in February 2026, and the first retrospective, made with the estate, opened at the Grey Art Gallery in New York two years after his death. Ira Sachs's film Peter Hujar's Day, of 2025, with Ben Whishaw, recreates a single day of his life.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
