Peter Hujar: Cityscapes & Landscapes
Studies of New York’s towering buildings, neighborhoods in transition, and the sea shoreline beyond the city limits.
Studies of New York’s towering buildings, neighborhoods in transition, and the sea shoreline beyond the city limits.
Studies of New York’s towering buildings, neighborhoods in transition, and the sea shoreline beyond the city limits.
To Hujar, who grew up on a farm, animals and people were of equal interest. His photographs of dogs, horses, and cows seem to convey a mutual recognition between photographer and subject, a sort of calm acknowledgement.
Hujar’s sometimes playful, often bleak photographs of New York after sunset show revelers of the nightlife and a decaying urban landscape, all wrapped in a velvety blackness broken only by street lamps, fluorescent building windows, and the camera’s flash.
The composed portraits of lovers, friends, and artists of New York’s Downtown milieu, often photographed in Hujar’s own loft, capture each sitter in an unrestrained moment of openness and connection.
The artist photographed the Palermo Catacombs during a 1963 trip to Italy with the painter Paul Thek. Hujar’s first monograph, Portraits in Life and Death published in 1976, juxtaposes these images with portraits of writers and artists from his own social circle.