When Peter Hujar was dying, his lover, the artist David Wojnarowicz, took photographs of his dilapidating body. The images are shocking and fragile, depicting his gaunt face, thin figure, shrivelled hands and cold, almost bruised feet. The black and white images were captured in parts, fragmented and distilled to illustrate “the essence of death,” the passing through of life states. As Wojnarowicz said himself, the images sought “to make the private into something public as an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world.”

Hujar primarily focused on portraiture, capturing his friends and figures from the downtown scene, whether encountered on the street, photographed in his apartment studio, or sought out backstage. His subjects also extended to animals, which he depicted with striking empathy, as well as architecture, landscapes, and street scenes. Eyes Open in the Dark highlights his later work, marked by a renewed creative energy following a period of severe depression in 1976. The exhibition also reflects the sombre shift in his photography during the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community and his work engaged in a dialogue with Wojnarowicz.

The series was first shown in 2018 at the Whitney Museum retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, and now appears again in an exhibition at Raven Row titled Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark. The exhibition is curated by Hujar’s close friend Gary Schneider, along with Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and director of Raven Row, Alex Sainsbury. This is the first exhibition dedicated to Hujar’s later photographic work.

Born in New Jersey in 1934, Hujar’s childhood was marked by difficulty and upheaval. Escaping home at the tender age of sixteen, he fled to Manhattan like a firefly, traversing the streets with his Rolleiflex camera. Sitting through satellite modules at the School of Industrial Arts, his teacher, Daisy Aldon, chaperoned him into a world of literature and art, where writer Frank O’Hara and expressionist painter John Ashbury adorned the pages of Folder. At the School of Industrial Arts, he was able to use the darkroom after hours to develop his early photographs.

By the end of the 1960s, Hujar had travelled to Italy to photograph the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. Places like Palermo are imbued with a spiritual reverence in Hujar’s photography, whether it be backstage at the Palm Casino Review, or through a broken window at Canal Street Piers, or a graveyard in Mazatlan, Mexico. Each place appears punctuated with a careful and meditative hand, his unblinking eye seeing through space, staring into an imperfect world.

Hujar’s images translate a private experience into a public consciousness. A break of light in the Hudson River is an epiphany. A devout portrait of Lola Pashalinski, where she seems to be unspooling her costume and revealing her heart, is an aria. He provides a brief but welcome departure from our ‘pre-invented’ world.

Hujar later juxtaposed the Catacomb images with portraits of his friends and artists, including filmmaker John Waters, drag queen Divine, and writers William Burroughs and Susan Sontag, the latter of whom wrote an introduction for the image that would appear in Portraits in Life and Death, published in 1976. This was the only major collection of photographs that Hujar published during his lifetime for he demurred to speak about himself or his work. He wrote little for the publication and gave only a select number of interviews in the press. His correspondences, for the most part, are a complete mystery.

His refusal to speak is one of the most consistent and intriguing characteristics of his work. In Photography in the First Person, Harrison Adams explains how throughout Hujar's career, he carried the mantle of “an inveterate outsider.” He was compared frequently and maladroitly to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose vast and well-documented success overpowered his sometimes derisively referred to reputation as a "photographer’s photographer."

Unlike Mapplethorpe’s images, which are confrontational, Hujar’s work is marked by silence, an interior interrogation of the sitter, whose qualities are captured and exaggerated in their quiet contemplation. As Adams writes, Hujar prioritised “[the sitters'] human sentience over their fleshy geometry.” In the images, Hujar leaves a sacred space for dialogue between the beholder and the beheld. The moment is not frozen in time, carved forever like Mapplethorpe’s marble-esque bodies. Instead, there is a desire for an encounter or an exchange. Hujar lets his subjects be themselves.

One of Hujar’s most well-known portraits is Candy Darling on her Deathbed, 1974, portraying an intimate encounter with Warhol Factory superstar Candy Darling. Candy is captured like a garden of time. There is a single rose as her bedfellow, a white bouquet behind her, standing like the cancer that plagued her. It is an arresting and private photograph. It also anticipates the photographs Wojnarowicz would come to take in 1989.

The exhibition at Raven Row successfully reveals the light and dark sides of Hujar's photography. On the walls we have an open-mouthed expression of blame and shame and the “terrific repercussions” we will all one day face.

Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is currently on view at Raven Row in London and continues until 6 April 2025