Should We See Peter Hujar’s Contact Sheets?

Though not made for public consumption, the darkroom work prints reveal his portraits as excerpts of a conversation, rather than memories snatched from the ether.

The Morgan Library & Museum might be milking its Peter Hujar collection, but I’m not complaining. Hujar:Contact is the Morgan’s second solo exhibition of the photographer’s work, coming on the heels of its 2013 acquisition of his archive and a sweeping 2018 retrospective, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. That exhibition was always going to be a tough act to follow, given the scale of the show, the impact of its reception, and Hujar’s importance as a key portraitist of New York City’s before-they-were-famous queer art scene. Nevertheless, it’s an unusual choice to mount an exhibition entirely dedicated to a photographer’s contact sheets, which by nature are not made for public consumption.

For those of us more fluent in digital culture, contact sheets are darkroom work prints that allow photographers to see all the images on a roll of film and select which ones are worthy of printing, given the time and expense that full-size printing requires — essentially, it’s the equivalent of showing us screenshots of Hujar’s camera roll. As eager as I am for a nerdy deep dive into his process, which the exhibition undoubtedly is, I’m left wrestling with the vague unease that it might also be an opportunistic mining of the photographer’s archive for all its worth. But I’ll check my paranoia at the door, because either way, the show’s outcome is good.

Entering the exhibition, the viewer is immersed on all sides in mural-sized photographic blowups of Hujar’s contact sheets and notebooks — a wise move, offsetting the small scale of the contact sheets (all 8.5 x 11 inches, or ~21.6 x 28 cm) and inviting one in for a closer look. (The trough full of magnifying glasses to borrow is also a nice touch). The introductory text is clearly prepared to reassure the cynic, stating at the outset that Hujar himself saved these materials for future scholars to study and “learn how I got to the final print.” The Morgan is, of course, a library and a museum, which strengthens the argument for its archive-forward approach.

Visually, it’s more of a mixed bag, as contact sheets so often are. They are most interesting as objects themselves when the photographs on the film strips come together to form a broader image or pattern — as in his nudes “Andrew, English boy” (c. 1972) and “Bruce de Sainte Croix” (1976) — or when the sheet appears to have inspired a repetition in the final print, like in “Ray Johnson Twice” (c. 1966). Hujar, fortunately, did most of his shooting on medium-format 120 film, meaning that the negatives are larger (2.4 x 2.4 inches or 6 x 6 cm) and nicer to look at as a grid; the handful of contact sheets for his 35mm work (a smaller, rectangular format) are harder to appreciate.

The photographer’s annotations — dotting or circling his favorites, marking where to crop — occasionally provide a glimpse into his evolving thought process. In “Seven-part movement executed by Robyn Brentano, S. K. Dunn, and Charles Dennis of Robert Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds” (1973), for example, Hujar numbers the images in a sequence that differs from the order in which he took the photographs, omitting some and reordering others to construct a smoother visual narrative. These notes-to-self helped him choose which images to make full-size (and thus more expensive) prints of later, and many such photographs hang nearby, like Hujar’s eternally moving 1973 portrait of Candy Darling on her deathbed alongside its contact sheet.

One walks away with the impression that, for Peter Hujar, photography was never a matter of the “decisive moment.” The contact sheets reveal that his portraits were the product of ongoing interactions — excerpts of a conversation, rather than memories snatched from the ether. Sometimes, they betray the inherent awkwardness of trying to coax someone, even a friend, into revealing themselves for the camera. It’s often harder to let down one’s guard than one’s clothes, and Hujar managed to capture his subjects doing both.

Left: Peter Hujar, “Andrew, English boy” (c. 1972), Job 550, 16 sheets, contact sheet; right: “Jay and Fernando” (1967), Job 322, 14 sheets, contact sheet

Left: Magnifying glasses for viewers to use to examine Hujar's contact sheets; installation view of Hujar:Contact

Hujar:Contact continues at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan) through October 25. The exhibition was curated by Joel Smith.