Portraits in Life and Death

Portraits in Life and Death is the only photography book Peter Hujar published during his lifetime, originally released in 1976 by Da Capo Press and reissued in 2024 by Liveright with a new foreword by Benjamin Moser alongside Susan Sontag's original introduction. The volume gathers forty-one black-and-white photographs in two sequences: twenty-nine portraits of creative figures from downtown New York—including Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, John Waters, Fran Lebowitz, Robert Wilson, and Divine—paired with eleven images of mummified bodies from the 19th-century Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, photographed in 1963. The juxtaposition turns the book into a meditation on mortality and presence, with Sontag praising Hujar's ability to capture "the inner spirit of his subjects" while sustaining "an air of nonchalance, even gaiety." Holland Cotter has called it "one of the most somberly beautiful and influential photography collections of its era," and the book stands as a defining artifact of post-Stonewall New York City.