Born in Trenton, New Jersey, photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987) is a landmark figure in the history of American photography. A source of inspiration for Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, he brought the elegant formalism of traditional black and white to deeply humane portraits of Merce Cunningham, Susan Sontag and other friends on the New York art scene, of his lover David Wojnarowicz and of companions ranging from Andy Warhol to Robert Mapplethorpe. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Hujar nightly prowled what was still the ill-famed no man’s land of the Leroy Street ‘meat market’, mapping society’s margins with pictures of solitary roamers lost in the dark, oddballs and other damned souls wandering like sleepwalkers through the abstractness of the sharp-edged streets. In his work Hujar captures the muted melody of night endlessly torn by his protagonists’ fragments of living. An uvre haunted by death—see his Portraits in Life and Death (1970), in which he recalls his discovery, with artist Paul Thek, of the desiccated bodies found in 1963 in the catacombs of the Capuchin monastery in Palermo—became the testament of an AIDS-decimated generation. Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, his photograph of the Factory superstar who died at twenty-six, was used by the group Antony and the Johnsons for the cover of their album I Am a Bird Now. As group leader Antony Hegarty has put it, ‘This photo embodies everything I’ve ever wanted to say with music. It’s shot through with the themes you find on the record. In the photo you see her between two worlds: she’s between life and death, between female and male, she’s sinking but she’s still radiant. The photo shows death coming in the door, but for me there’s something more I mean, this photo’s not all darkness, there’s something enormously beautiful shining within it. And I think that’s because there’s something very spiritual and very emotional in there.’
