Hujar was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents on a farm in New Jersey, after he and his mother were abandoned by his father. In 1946, after his grandmother died, he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, where he suffered physical abuse. He left home at sixteen-years-old and enrolled in the School of Industrial Art in 1953 to study commercial photography. He began working as an apprentice around New York and became involved in the flourishing downtown New York arts scene; he traveled to Italy with artist Paul Thek in 1963, worked in the studio of photographer Harold Krieger and appeared in Andy Warhol’s screen tests and the film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

In 1967, Hujar quit commercial photography to focus solely on his artistic practice. His early commercial work, along with the fashion photography of Richard Avedon and Lissette Model’s gritty portraiture, greatly influenced his style, which was always black and white, technical and concerned with formal aesthetic principles. He used this approach to great effect, depicting avant-garde, outsider and multifarious personalities with the immediacy and slickness of high-fashion magazines and advertisements. By blending these two seemingly opposed approaches, he humanized, through triumphant acts of intimacy, those disregarded and feared by society, such as drag performers, gender fluid people, gay men (glorifying their nude bodies) and those close to him diagnosed with AIDS. He published his first and only book of photography, Portraits in Life and Death, in 1976, which featured photographs he had taken while exploring the catacombs at Palermo and an introduction by Susan Sontag. In 1981, already an established photographer, he met young David Wojnarowicz, who became his lover, partner and protégé.

Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January 1987 and died later that year. A long overdue and celebrated retrospective of his work, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life was presented by The Morgan Library, New York in 2017 and traveled widely throughout Europe and America. Hujar’s work is held in such prestigious collections as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. Recent reconsiderations of Hujar’s body of work reveal his uncompromising documentation of the tumult of the latter half of the 20th century and how he imbued it with complexity, warmth and beauty.