Hujar: Contact

Co-published by MACK and the Morgan Library and Museum to accompany a 2026 exhibition, Hujar: Contact is built around one of the great untapped archives in twentieth-century American photography: the roughly 5,700 contact sheets and job books left behind by Peter Hujar, the New York photographer best known for his portraits of downtown artists, writers, and performers from the 1970s and 80s. Curator Joel Smith uses the contact sheets, rather than Hujar's finished prints, as the primary material, giving readers a rare look at the working process behind pictures usually encountered as single, resolved objects. The book moves chronologically from 1954 through the mid-1980s, tracking Hujar's development against the backdrop of Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, and the shifting cultural politics of gay life in New York.

The book includes early, unpublished, and alternate takes of sittings with Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, Fran Lebowitz, and Gary Indiana, letting readers see the contact sheet as a decision-making record rather than a finished statement. Archivist Olivia McCall's transcriptions of Hujar's job books add another layer, grounding the images in the practical rhythm of his working life. The physical object matches the material's intimacy: a flexicover binding with a linen spine designed to evoke the plastic sleeves contact sheets are typically stored in.