Love & Lust

Peter Hujar: Love & Lust is the first monograph dedicated to Hujar's photographs of eroticism and intimacy, published by Fraenkel Gallery in 2014 in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. Made between 1969 and 1986, the thirty-six tritone plates gather Hujar's male and female nudes, embraces, and unguarded studio portraits—work that, in the words of the gallery, has come to define a certain era in New York and is widely considered to be his finest and most radical. Jeffrey Fraenkel introduces the volume Vince Aletti contributes a newly commissioned essay placing Hujar's work alongside the downtown New York scene of artists, writers, and performers he photographed Stephen Koch contextualizes Hujar's relationship to friends and lovers and a candid interview with Fran Lebowitz closes the book. Hujar (1934–1987) photographed his subjects with the same exacting black-and-white tonalities and unsentimental gaze that distinguished his portraits and animal studies, and Love & Lust assembles, for the first time in book form, the side of his practice most closely tied to the body.