Hujar:Contact

The catalogue of the Morgan Library & Museum's 2026 exhibition of Peter Hujar's contact sheets, together with the job books in which he logged his shoots.

Hujar (1934–1987) started to number and file his sheets when he was 21, and the Morgan acquired the collection, more than 5,700 contact sheets dating from 1954, in 2013. He gave up commercial magazine work in 1973, and his later independent years were spent in the East Village. His job books record over a thousand shoots; Olivia McCall has transcribed them and added notes, so the sheets can be read against Hujar's own records.

Joel Smith's texts put the sheets in date order and follow Hujar as he tried things out and sharpened his work, against the upheavals in gay life for which Stonewall and AIDS now stand. Many frames here have never been seen before, and among them are the first takes of portraits he is now known for, of Fran Lebowitz, Candy Darling, Paul Thek, David Wojnarowicz and Susan Sontag. Protest crowds, damaged relics and farm animals appear too.

MACK with the Morgan Library & Museum, 2026. 364 pages, flexicover with linen spine, 22.2 x 29.9 cm.