Peter Hujar is finally receiving the museum treatment once reserved for the people he photographed. In The Drift, Max Norman uses a Morgan Library exhibition of contact sheets and Andrew Durbin’s dual biography of Hujar and Paul Thek to ask what this recognition should change about the history of photography.
- Not an outsider’s expedition: Hujar photographed his own downtown queer world. Norman contrasts that intimacy with Susan Sontag’s account of photographers venturing into other people’s lives to dignify or expose them.
- A scene helped produce its critic: Durbin connects Sontag’s ideas about camp to Hujar, and the argument of “Against Interpretation” to Thek. Intellectual influence did not guarantee either artist a secure place in the canon.
- The contact sheets show the work: Lighting, cropping, and darkroom decisions intensify encounters without reducing every sitter to a signature photographic “treatment.”
- Life before elegy: Durbin emphasizes the artists’ abundant lives rather than treating their deaths from AIDS-related causes as the inevitable meaning of everything that preceded them.
Norman’s strongest distinction is between an image that invites us to inspect someone and one that preserves an encounter with them. Hujar’s portraits of friends, performers, animals, and even the Hudson River suggest depth without claiming to explain it away.
The useful question isn’t simply why the market took so long to notice him. It’s whether museums can recognize this art of private experience without turning it into another saleable myth of a vanished downtown.