The photographs by Peter Hujar (USA, 1934–1987), one of the most important American photographers, capture avant-garde theatre, drag shows, and key figures in New York’s underground scene during the 1970s. These images are shown alongside a selection of photographs taken during his travels in Italy.
What do the mummies of the Palermo catacombs, orgasm, the novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Iggy Pop, John Waters, Lucinda Childs, Neapolitan bathers, New York’s experimental theatre of the ’70s, and drag shows have in common?
The answer is Peter Hujar, a photographer who captured, like few others, the relationship between life and death—and all the hidden spaces in between. This exhibition, originally created by the Art Institute of Chicago and expanded for the Centro Pecci, includes a special section dedicated to Hujar’s travels in Italy from the 1950s to the 1970s.
About Peter Hujar
Peter Hujar (b. 1934, Trenton, New Jersey) died of AIDS related complications in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. Hujar’s photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam for a retrospective in 1994. Exhibited and organised by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid starting in 2017, the exhibition Speed of Life made its final stop at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France in 2019. In 2024, the Peter Hujar Foundation presented Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death during the Venice Biennale. His work remains in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, the Tate, London, and the Reina Sofía, Madrid.
