The Morgan Library & Museum may be drawing heavily from its Peter Hujar holdings, but it is hard to object. Hujar:Contact is the museum’s second solo exhibition devoted to the photographer, following its 2013 acquisition of his archive and the expansive 2018 retrospective, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life.
That earlier show was always going to be difficult to top, given its scale, its critical reception, and Hujar’s significance as a major portraitist of New York City’s queer art scene before its figures became widely known. Even so, it is a striking decision to mount an exhibition devoted entirely to a photographer’s contact sheets, which are not typically intended for public viewing.
For readers more accustomed to digital culture, contact sheets are darkroom work prints that let photographers view every image on a roll of film and decide which frames are worth printing, especially when full-size prints are costly and time-consuming. In effect, it is like being shown screenshots of Hujar’s camera roll.
As much as I look forward to a detailed, deeply nerdy exploration of his process — which the exhibition surely offers — I cannot help feeling a slight discomfort that this may also amount to an opportunistic stripping of the archive for every possible asset. Still, I will set that suspicion aside, because whatever the motivation, the result is a rewarding one.
