Self-Portraits on Heel Pocket Notebook
A pocket notebook from the Morgan Library & Museum's 2026 exhibition Hujar:Contact. Its cover is a full contact sheet of self-portraits Peter Hujar shot in his Second Avenue loft in 1974.
The sheet is job 620 in Hujar's numbering: three strips of square-format film, twelve frames, one of them blank. In ten he is shirtless in jeans against a white studio wall. He repeats one pose with small changes: a hand raised to his brow in a salute, a leg kicked back behind him. In the eleventh he stands square to the camera in the open loft, hands on his hips. Red editing marks flag a single frame in the middle strip. The back cover prints the museum's credit in white on black: Self-portraits on heel, 189 Second Avenue, 1974, Peter Hujar Collection, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013 (2013.108:8.2109). Inside are 48 unlined pages.
Hujar (1934-1987) filed and numbered his contact sheets from the age of 21, and the Morgan holds more than 5,700 of them along with his job books. Hujar:Contact (May 22 to October 25, 2026), curated by Joel Smith, shows over 110 sheets beside 20 enlargements. Its catalogue, co-published with MACK, is also in the library. The shop listed the notebook on the day the exhibition opened.