Peter Hujar: Behind the Camera and In the Darkroom

Peter Hujar: Behind the Camera and In the Darkroom is Gary Schneider's intimate memoir of his friendship with Peter Hujar (1934–1987), written from the perspective of Schneider's later role as Hujar's posthumous printer. Schneider (b. 1954) takes thirty-two of Hujar's photographs as starting points—portraits, nudes, animals, and downtown New York vignettes he has known from the contact sheet through to the final print—and uses each as the entry to a short essay on technique, biography, friendship, and grief. The result interleaves precise printerly attention with the social texture of pre- and early-AIDS-era downtown New York, where Schneider lived and worked alongside Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, and the wider circle of artists Hujar photographed. Co-published with Delpire & Co (which handles European distribution) and distributed worldwide by D.A.P., the volume is one of the few Hujar publications written from inside the studio rather than the institutional vantage, and a rare extended account of how Hujar's photographs are made—on the wall and on the printing easel.