Speed of Life

 


"It’s hard to say which is more surprising: that Peter Hujar’s photographs of 1970s and ’80s underground life in New York life have found their way to the Morgan Library & Museum, or that this Classically-minded institution has become unbuttoned enough to exhibit them in a heartbreaker of a show called “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life."

...It demonstrates that each of Hujar’s photographs is a stand-alone object, masterfully conceived and printed, complete in itself. Yet the work overall is the product of a single complex, difficult sensibility. It shares a pervasive and insistent atmosphere of otherness, and — this comes through only gradually — a spirit of level-eyed fortitude in the face of damage."

                                                                                                 Holland Cotter, New York Times