CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/27/2014

Peter Hujar: Love & Lust

Featured image, "Felix, Clyde, Ronnie, and Manny" (1976), is reproduced from Peter Hujar: Love & Lust, released just last week and already one of the most coveted books on our list this season. In a moving 1989 conversation with Peter Sokolowski, published inside the book, Fran Lebowitz describes Hujar. "He was an insider. What connects all his photographs is that every single person he photographed, every single person that he was interested in, each of his friends, was a misfit. That’s why those pictures are inside. It’s true of the children; it’s true of the drag queens. For someone who had so much distance in real life, Peter had no distance from his subjects. There’s no irony in his photographs, there’s no contempt, there’s no slumming, there’s no . . . curiosity. He was not curious about those people; he was not judgmental the way I am."