Peter Hujar was born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, and raised in poverty before making his way to New York City as a young man. He went on to become one of the most important photographers of the 20th century: revered by anyone who cared seriously about the medium, but largely unknown outside it.
His black-and-white portraits have a quality that is almost impossible to fake: a stillness and intimacy suggesting the subject has genuinely allowed themselves to be seen. Susan Sontag wrote the introduction to his 1976 book Portraits in Life and Death. His influence on photographers including Nan Goldin has been immense. He died of AIDS in 1987, aged 53.
This spring, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York opens Hujar: Contact (May 22 to October 25 2026), drawing on its archive of more than 5,700 of Hujar's contact sheets. And for photographers specifically, that's the bit that makes it most interesting.
Article continues belowWhy contact sheets mattered
If you've only ever shot digitally, a contact sheet might need explaining. In the film era, before you committed the time and expense of a full darkroom print, you'd lay your negatives directly onto photographic paper and expose them all at once, producing a grid of thumbnail images in the order you shot them. It was your Lightroom library, your first honest reckoning with what you'd actually got.
Typically photographers would examine them with a loupe (a small magnifying glass designed for inspecting film), marking selects with a chinagraph pencil (a waxy marker that writes cleanly on glossy surfaces and wipes away if you change your mind).
In short, contact sheets are the part of photography most photographers keep to themselves. They show everything: the misfires, the near-misses, the frame before the decisive one and the frame after it.
New York time capsule
Hujar began filing contact sheets and assigning them job numbers at age 21, and continued until his death, logging more than a thousand shoots in meticulous job books. Many sheets bear his editing marks in varying colours of oil pencil, a personal notation system for decisions about cropping, sequencing and printing. Those marks make the sheets read less like an archive and more like a lesson.
It's one thing to stand before a Hujar portrait and admire its stillness. It's another to see the contact sheet it came from, to understand the alternatives he considered and dismissed, the moment he chose and the ones he didn't. Photography is often described as an art of instinct. Hujar's contact sheets suggest it was, for him, equally an art of deliberate and sustained looking.
The exhibition brings together more than 110 sheets and 20 enlargements. The subjects range across downtown New York life: Susan Sontag, Candy Darling, Iggy Pop, Marsha P. Johnson, David Wojnarowicz, John Waters. Hujar wasn't photographing these people from the outside, he was embedded among them. And the sheets collectively chart, as the show's curator Joel Smith puts it, the sea changes of gay life from Stonewall to the AIDS crisis.
There's an argument that the contact sheet is a casualty of digital photography. Scrolling a Lightroom catalogue doesn't accumulate in the same physical way. You can't annotate it in oil pencil and hand it to a researcher 50 years later. Hujar's archive is a reminder of what careful record-keeping makes possible, both for the photographer and for everyone who comes after.
Hujar: Contact is at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York from May 22 to October 25. The accompanying 364-page catalogue is being published by MACK, costin $70 / £55.
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