Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death: A Meditation on Beauty, Mortality, and the Intimacy of Looking -

Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death: A Meditation on Beauty, Mortality, and the Intimacy of Looking

It’s almost impossible to open Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death and not feel that peculiar hush that settles over you in the presence of something both beautiful and unsettling. The book — first published in 1976 and reissued in 2024 — remains one of the most haunting and quietly magnificent works of photography in the twentieth century. It is not a grand statement, nor a coffee-table monolith of glossy spectacle. It is, instead, an austere, personal object: forty-one black-and-white photographs that carry within them an entire philosophy of seeing.

At first, the book appears deceptively straightforward. It begins with portraits of the living — Hujar’s friends, lovers, and contemporaries in New York’s downtown art scene of the 1970s. The images are simple, stripped of artifice. A face against a wall. A body reclining on a bed. A moment caught somewhere between awareness and dream. But then, at the end, something changes. The final section takes us into the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, where Hujar photographed mummified corpses hanging in alcoves and lined along the walls. These images of the dead — desiccated, fragile, dressed in their Sunday best — come only after we’ve looked into the eyes of the living. The effect is devastating. Hujar doesn’t hit us with death at the outset; he lets us arrive there slowly, almost tenderly, as though reminding us that the two states — life and death — are not opposites, but part of one continuous breath.

A Photographer Among Friends

Peter Hujar was, by all accounts, a man of contradictions. Sensitive yet difficult, reclusive but deeply empathetic, he resisted fame even as he sought to capture beauty. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934, Hujar came of age as photography was shifting from documentary form to something more personal and introspective. His work belongs to the lineage of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, yet it stands apart from both. Where Arbus was fascinated by the grotesque and Mapplethorpe by the stylised and sculptural, Hujar occupied a quieter space — intimate, melancholic, deeply human.

The portraits in Portraits in Life and Death were mostly taken between the late 1960s and early 1970s. His sitters were people he knew well — artists, writers, musicians, drag performers, and lovers who inhabited the same scrappy downtown world as he did. Among them were Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, John Waters, and Divine. There is an extraordinary gentleness in the way he sees them. You never get the sense that he is performing photography; rather, he is sharing time with them, allowing the image to surface naturally. Hujar’s gift was his patience. He waited for stillness — for that moment when the sitter dropped the performance of self and something unguarded emerged.

Take, for instance, his portrait of Sontag. She’s lying back, self-contained, the gaze turned away from us rather than into the lens; no theatrical lighting, no clever staging — just a person caught between thought and silence.

Peter Hujar's — Susan Sontag ©Peter Hujar

In her introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, Sontag writes: “Photography … converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording-angels of death … [In] this selection of Peter Hujar’s work, fleshed and moist-eyed friends and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, mostly lie—and are made to appear to meditate on their own mortality. Do meditate, whether they … acknowledge it or not. We no longer study the art of dying, … but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably. The Palermo photographs—which precede these portraits in time—complete them, comment upon them. Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.”

The portraits of his friends and lovers share this same atmosphere of quiet intimacy. Some are clothed, others nude, yet none feel voyeuristic. The body, in Hujar’s world, is not spectacle; it’s simply a vessel for light and feeling. His photographs invite us to linger — not in the way one gawks, but in the way one listens.

Susan Sontag’s Mirror

Sontag’s introduction to the original edition is short, sharp, and prophetic. She wrote, “Photography is the inventory of mortality. Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.” It’s one of those lines that changes how you see the entire book. It also defines the strange duality at its core: every photograph is both an assertion of presence and an announcement of absence. Hujar understood this instinctively. To photograph someone, after all, is to admit they will one day be gone — that the photograph will outlive them.

Sontag and Hujar were kindred spirits in that regard. She once described photography as a “melancholy act of preservation”, and his pictures are exactly that: melancholy without being morbid. The portraits celebrate aliveness while acknowledging, quietly, that it cannot last.

The Palermo Photographs: Death Without Drama

Then come the Palermo images. After so many living faces, the sight of the mummified dead takes you aback. Hujar photographed these figures in the Capuchin catacombs during a visit to Sicily in the late 1960s. The catacombs themselves are one of those places where the boundary between reverence and horror blurs: thousands of preserved bodies, dressed and arranged by social status — priests, soldiers, children — all suspended in time. Many photographers have documented the site, but none with Hujar’s restraint. There is no sensationalism in his approach, no attempt to shock. The dead are given the same calm dignity as his living sitters.

In one image, a man’s face is reduced to parchment skin and hollow eyes, yet Hujar’s composition softens the grotesque. The figure is illuminated gently, the shadows respectful. These aren’t “memento mori” in the heavy-handed sense; they are extensions of the portraits that precede them. It’s as if Hujar is saying: this is what comes next, this is what we all become — and isn’t it, in its way, still beautiful?

The decision to end the book with these photographs rather than begin with them is crucial. By first leading us through life — through the faces of those he loved and lived among — Hujar prepares us to meet death with empathy rather than fear. The sequence invites reflection: each living face becomes a prelude to the dead ones, and each dead face echoes back into the living.

The 2024 Edition: Remembering Anew

Nearly fifty years after its first publication, Portraits in Life and Death was reissued in 2024 by Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. This new edition is more than a reprint; it’s a reverent resurrection. The sequencing and images remain faithful to Hujar’s original design, but the production quality brings an astonishing depth to the photographs — the blacks more velvety, the mid-tones richer, the whites almost tactile.

Benjamin Moser, Sontag’s biographer and a Pulitzer Prize winner, contributes a new foreword that bridges past and present. He writes about how the book, once seen as a niche art object, now feels eerily contemporary — how, in an age saturated with self-portraiture and digital ephemera, Hujar’s stillness and sincerity seem radical. Moser also revisits Sontag’s text, reading it through the lens of her later writings on illness and mortality, and in doing so he reveals just how prophetic she and Hujar were. The reissue coincided with a major exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale curated by Grace Deveney, where the complete sequence was shown together for the first time in Europe. Critics hailed it as one of the Biennale’s most affecting installations: a room of ghosts who refused to frighten, only to be remembered.

The new edition also serves a practical function — it reintroduces Hujar to readers and viewers who may have only known his name in passing, often in relation to his partner, the artist David Wojnarowicz. It restores him as a central figure in queer photographic history and, more broadly, in the story of twentieth-century art.

The Queer Lens

To talk about Hujar without talking about queerness would be to miss the beating heart of his work. The New York he documented was queer in the fullest sense: defiant, marginal, tender, and self-invented. His subjects — drag performers like Divine, artists like Paul Thek, lovers whose names have since faded from the record — were part of a subculture that lived on the edges of respectability but at the centre of creative life. Hujar’s photographs are not activist in a political sense, but they are radically humanising. They present queer bodies not as spectacle or curiosity but as beings of flesh, emotion, and spirit.

In the years after his death from AIDS in 1987, many of Hujar’s subjects also succumbed to the epidemic. Viewed in hindsight, the book reads almost like a premonition — a collective portrait of a generation about to vanish. When you look at those faces now, knowing what came after, the effect is almost unbearable. Yet Hujar’s refusal to sentimentalise gives the work its endurance. He doesn’t romanticise loss; he dignifies it.

The Stillness of Hujar’s Eye

Technically, Hujar was a master of simplicity. He used available light whenever possible, working with medium-format cameras that allowed for extraordinary detail. But technique was never his priority. What mattered was atmosphere. His photographs breathe. The spaces between things — between the sitter’s gaze and the lens, between light and shadow — are as alive as the subjects themselves.

In interviews, those who knew him often describe his prints as “objects of feeling”. Vince Aletti, a critic and one of Hujar’s friends, once said that Hujar taught him “to see the print as a living thing — to touch it, hold it, respect it”. That physicality carries over in the book. Every image feels handcrafted, deliberate, as if Hujar were still in the darkroom coaxing the tones into being.

Life and Death, Not Either/Or

What makes Portraits in Life and Death so enduring is that it doesn’t moralise or philosophise overtly. It doesn’t tell us what to think about mortality, art, or beauty. It simply presents. Yet in that simplicity lies its profundity. The pairing of life and death is not rhetorical — it’s experiential. As viewers, we move through it as we move through our own lives: from vitality to stillness, from laughter to silence. The book asks us to hold both states at once.

There’s a peculiar comfort in that. In Hujar’s world, death isn’t an intrusion; it’s part of the continuum of being. The Palermo mummies, for all their decay, are treated with the same compassion as the living sitters. They, too, were once part of life’s conversation. By photographing them with tenderness, Hujar extends the same grace to the dead that he offers the living. That, perhaps, is the deepest act of empathy photography can perform.

A Book for Our Time

If anything, the book feels even more resonant today. We live in an era of relentless imagery, where photographs are made and discarded in seconds. Against that backdrop, Hujar’s work insists on slowness. It invites contemplation. Each frame is a pause — a reminder that to look is also to care. The new edition, with its careful printing and contextual essays, restores that meditative quality. It reminds us that art can be both mournful and consoling, both private and universal.

The photographs don’t age because they were never about fashion or trends. They were about attention. And attention — the act of really seeing another human being — is timeless.

Legacy and Influence

In the decades since Hujar’s death, his influence has quietly expanded. Contemporary photographers such as Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Collier Schorr have all acknowledged his impact, whether directly or by osmosis. You can see his spirit in their work — the intimacy, the vulnerability, the refusal to separate beauty from decay. Yet no one has quite matched his tone. Hujar’s gaze was singular: loving but unsparing, romantic but realistic.

It’s fitting that Portraits in Life and Death has become his defining work, because it encapsulates everything that made him who he was — the tenderness, the melancholy, the belief that photography could hold emotion without words. It also serves as a quiet manifesto for how to look at the world: with empathy, patience, and courage.

To spend time with Portraits in Life and Death is to be reminded that art, at its best, slows us down. It makes us linger in the spaces we usually hurry past — the crease of a hand, the shadow under an eye, the echo of a life that has already faded. Hujar’s photographs don’t shout for attention. They whisper. And that whisper is what stays with you.

When the final image fades from view — one of the mummified figures in Palermo, head bowed, caught forever between repose and decay — you can’t help but flip back to the beginning, to the faces of Hujar’s friends. You look at them again, differently this time. You see the light falling across their skin, the vulnerability in their eyes, and you realise what Hujar understood all along: that life and death aren’t separate chapters, but two sides of the same page.

In a world obsessed with permanence, Peter Hujar offered us transience. In a medium that often trades in glamour, he gave us truth. Portraits in Life and Death remains not just a book of photographs, but a profound act of remembrance — for his friends, for himself, and for all of us still learning how to look.

To purchase the latest copy of this book, please click here.

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