Readers are revisiting Peter Hujar and Paul Thek’s complicated friendship through a new joint biography and a rich body of photographs. From New York’s queer underground to Rome, Sicily and the Stonewall era, their story matters because it connects intimate art, chosen family and the urgent history of gay life.

Essential Takeaways

  • Hujar photographed intimacy: His portraits feel close, tactile and emotionally unguarded.
  • Thek shaped his vision: Their romance influenced Hujar’s early images and later understanding of bodies, desire and death.
  • Animals mattered too: Hujar photographed cows, dogs and goats with the same attention he gave human sitters.
  • Stonewall changed the landscape: Hujar’s work became closely tied to queer liberation and New York’s emerging gay-rights movement.
  • His legacy still resonates: Museums and archives continue to bring his portraits, self-portraits and erotic images to new audiences.

Peter Hujar made closeness feel almost physical

The first thing that strikes you about Hujar’s photography is its warmth. Even when his subjects are guarded, theatrical or explicitly sexual, the images rarely feel like specimens under glass. They seem to breathe, as if the sitter might shift position the moment you look away.

That quality grew from Hujar’s unusual approach to portrait-making. He often knew his subjects as friends, lovers or fellow travellers through New York’s bohemian and queer worlds. Rather than hiding behind the camera, he used conversation, flirtation and patience to encourage people to relax. The result is work that feels less like visual capture and more like an exchange.

The Morgan’s collection records this breadth, from intimate portraits to self-images and studies of bodies. Meanwhile, Wallpaper’s account of Hujar and Thek’s friendship places those photographs inside a much messier emotional world, where affection and resentment were rarely far apart.

A romance that became an artistic engine

Hujar and Thek met through their shared circle in the late 1950s and became lovers around 1960. Their relationship wasn’t conventionally domestic, but it was intense enough to shape both men’s lives. They travelled, argued, worked and moved through the same artistic communities, often pulling other writers, performers and artists into their orbit.

Their time in Rome and Sicily proved especially important. A visit to Palermo’s Capuchin catacombs left a lasting mark on both artists, giving them a powerful visual language of preserved bodies, theatrical decay and mortality. Hujar translated the experience into stark photographs, while Thek explored related ideas through wax, sculpture and installations.

The relationship eventually broke apart, but it never quite disappeared. Hujar continued to photograph Thek, including a later portrait marked by affection, suspicion and emotional distance. It’s a reminder that old lovers don’t always become strangers. Sometimes they become the most difficult subjects to see clearly.

Why Hujar’s queer portraits still feel modern

Hujar began making more openly queer photographs during a period when gay male eroticism was rarely treated with seriousness by the mainstream art world. His subjects could be leather men, performers, lovers, cross-dressers or people encountered around the piers and streets of lower Manhattan.

Yet the photographs don’t reduce anyone to a label. His sitters appear self-possessed, vulnerable, mischievous or lost, often all at once. That emotional range separates Hujar’s work from a purely documentary record of a subculture. These are portraits of people shaping themselves in public, sometimes defiantly and sometimes with a soft, private uncertainty.

The contrast with Diane Arbus is useful. Hujar’s work is often discussed alongside hers, but his gaze tends to be more enveloping than clinical. Even when an image is erotic or startling, he usually gives the subject room to remain a person rather than turning them into a curiosity.

The Stonewall era gave his work a public charge

Hujar’s photography belonged to the same restless New York that produced the Stonewall uprising and the Gay Liberation Front. He wasn’t naturally suited to organised activism, particularly when political groups appeared to demand respectability in exchange for acceptance. Cruising, sexual freedom and self-invention were central to his life, and he resisted attempts to tidy them away.

Still, he contributed one of the defining images associated with the movement. His poster for the Gay Liberation Front shows a group running towards the viewer, bright light behind them. The image feels joyous rather than defensive, offering liberation as motion, community and possibility.

That optimism sits alongside the darker parts of his work. Hujar was fascinated by death, but not in a detached or academic way. His photographs of the catacombs, sick friends and vulnerable bodies suggest that looking directly at mortality can also be a form of care. As the Morgan’s holdings show, his visual language could be severe, but it was rarely cold.

Choosing the right way to explore Hujar’s photographs

Newcomers may find Hujar’s archive easier to approach by following themes rather than chronology. Start with portraits, then move to animals, self-portraits, erotic work and images connected to death. The connections become clearer when you see how often he treated these subjects as part of one continuous investigation into presence and vulnerability.

It’s also worth paying attention to printing. Hujar’s darkroom decisions mattered enormously. He adjusted light, shadow and background with care, giving some images a painterly softness and others a deep, almost velvety intensity. His photographs weren’t simple windows onto reality; they were carefully shaped encounters.

The wider archive, including material held by the Peter Hujar Archive and discussed by Wallpaper, also helps place his work beside Thek’s more experimental practice. Together, the two artists reveal different responses to the same questions: what happens to the body, how can desire be pictured and what remains after intimacy ends?

A legacy built from intimacy, not fame

Hujar’s career was never as commercially secure as it might have been. He quarrelled with editors, avoided easy categorisation and often lived precariously. Friends recalled a fiercely intelligent, volatile man who could be generous one moment and explosive the next. That roughness is part of the story, but it shouldn’t eclipse the discipline of the photographs.

His friendship with David Wojnarowicz became especially important during Hujar’s final years. Wojnarowicz saw him as a mentor, lover, artistic guide and almost paternal figure. Their connection offers a gentler counterpoint to the more combative story of Hujar and Thek, showing how artistic influence can pass between generations through trust as much as argument.

Hujar died in 1987 from complications related to Aids, and Thek died the following year. Their lives are often viewed through that tragic ending, but the photographs resist being reduced to elegy. They remain alert, sensual and surprisingly alive, which is perhaps the most fitting tribute of all.

It's a small archive with a remarkably large emotional range.

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