The Shabbiness of Beauty

A cross-generational visual dialogue between the New York photographer and writer Moyra Davey (b. 1958) and Peter Hujar (1934–1987), in which Davey mines Hujar's archive for little-known images and answers them with photographs of her own.

Drawing mainly on scarcely seen pictures from the Hujar archive, Davey pairs his work with her own responses across an idiosyncratic set of shared subjects: nudes, animals, water, babies, and city streets. The sequence is spiritually anchored in New York even as it ranges out to rural Quebec and Pennsylvania, crystallising tensions between city and country, human and animal, and between Davey's postmodern sensibility and Hujar's humanist one. The book follows the exhibition Davey curated at Galerie Buchholz in spring 2020 and includes a new text by Eileen Myles, Davey's text for that show, and a note by Stephen Koch on a Hujar letter reproduced in the book. Debossed printed hardback, 128 pages, published by MACK in 2021.

Davey, known for works such as the Copperhead series and her essay-films, pairs photography with language throughout her practice Hujar, a central figure of downtown New York's queer artistic circles, left an archive whose portraits, nudes, and animal studies have shaped contemporary photography. The volume joins the library's other Hujar holdings, including Peter Hujar: A Retrospective and Hujar:Contact.