Hujar invokes the skull beneath the skin through the black magic of photography, which, by fixing his subjects' expressions for eternity, turns living faces into death masks and, contrariwise, brings the dead to life by putting flesh on the bones of memory.--Mark Dery "4Columns"

Hujar was able to create photographs of human beings, people as brilliant and flawed and vulnerable and lonely as he was, and the fact that they were famous plays no role in any of that. You can see people with an inner life, possibly a very rich one . . . Highly recommend.--Jörg Colberg "Conscientious Photography Magazine"

In this collection there's no in-between the vibrantly alive and the dusty dead, like a book with chapters ripped out, a bald comment about inevitable endings, even for the once most gloriously alive. Moser and Sontag make a case for Time, ruthless and remorseless though it may be, erasing irrelevancies and dross, leaving art of the stature of a Hujar burnished and deepened over time. 'Eternal' may be a cruel myth, but Hujar has a shot.--Robert Brokl "Bay Area Reporter"

This long out-of-print publication by American photographer Peter Hujar, the only monograph he produced in his lifetime, has finally been reissued by Liveright.... As his posthumous fame only increases, this tightly curated collection of photographs of Hujar's friends and peers (Paul Thek, Anne Waldman, John Waters and Robert Wilson among them), paired with a haunting series of 1963 photographs of the dead in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, will remind fans of what makes him such a singular and original American artist.--Andrew Durbin, Frieze, 2024 Holiday Gift Gude

A stunning new edition... Sensuous and sensitive, this is a real masterwork.--Olivia Laing "The Observer"

The subject of the book, Benjamin Moser writes in a new foreword, is time: 'time that strips, that erases, and that kills; the time that has killed most of the people in this book, half a century after Hujar photographed them.' But time has also transformed this once obscure artist into a hero, decades after his death from AIDS, and that's another story of this remarkable book, especially upon its republication, Moser points out: Time 'can also revive the dead.'--Dan Kois "Slate"

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation

Pub date: 2024-10-08

Length: 100 pages