Lost Downtown

Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown is the Steidl / Pace MacGill Gallery monograph of twenty tritone portraits Hujar made of his closest friends and downtown New York peers between 1972 and 1985, with an essay by Vince Aletti. The book draws together pictures of Joe Brainard, William S. Burroughs, Edwin Denby, Divine, Fran Lebowitz, Charles Ludlam, Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Wilson, and others—figures who, in Aletti's framing, populated a Lower East Side scene of artists, wannabe artists, and hangers-on "gathered from every town in America and relocated in the mean streets between Broadway and the Bowery." Hujar (1934–1987) photographed them with the unsentimental gravity that defined his work: subjects recline, sit, stare back, give up the camera meets them at their level rather than mythologizing them. Published to accompany the exhibition Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, in early 2016, the book is now out of print and serves, in Aletti's word, as a record of "a vanished world" that has since been claimed by gentrification, AIDS, and time.