Peter Hujar in New Orleans, 1980

Steve Turtell, who is working on a book about the influence of Peter Hujar's photography entitled, "Peter Hujar: Invisible Master," spoke earlier this year for the Camera Club of New York about his trip to Mardi Gras with Hujar in 1980.  Turtell also discussed this somewhat disastrous trip during the filming of the Peter Hujar Oral History Project.  The trip both complexified the relationship between these two young men, and revealed to Turtell some of the fascinating contradictions of Hujar's personality, which is often described as equally seductive and antagonistic.  

Only two of the images from Hujar's contact sheets were known to be printed by the artist during his lifetime.  Earlier today, however, the Archive released a number of contact sheets from this trip on the PHA tumblr page. Here are a few:  

Comments

[Stephen Koch]

Peter Hujar is famous as the outlier or outliers. Yet take a look at these contact sheets from Mardi Gras. Everyone, but everyone, is trying to look outré, extreme, hot, exotic, fabulous. Yet back in the silence of his New York studio, which images did Peter add to great body of work he left behind?
Something really, really wild? Wild feathers? Show-off pecs? Something beyond beyond?

No.

He chose a picture of a duck. Just a duck. And a picture of a African-American boy whose facial scars war are white spots on his tender, perplexed little face. Impossible to either image comes from Mardi Gras. Both are masterpieces.