Hujar: Contact draws from the vast archive of original contact sheets and job books produced between 1954 and 1986, offering an intimate insight into the evolution of a photographic practice shaped through observation, experimentation and repetition. The material, preserved by the Morgan Library & Museum, reveals the working process behind some of the most significant portraits and images of late twentieth-century New York.

The photographs move across a wide range of subjects — protests, abandoned objects, animals, urban fragments — yet remain deeply connected to the creative and underground communities that defined the city’s cultural life. At the centre of the work is an ongoing exploration of portraiture and human presence, capturing artists, writers and performers within overlapping social circles shaped by the political and cultural transformations of the period.

The publication also includes transcriptions and annotations from more than a thousand recorded photo sessions, offering access to unpublished images and early versions of iconic works. Together, the contact sheets and archival notes construct a detailed portrait of an artist refining his visual language while responding to the changing realities of queer life, activism and artistic community in New York during the years marked by Stonewall and the AIDS crisis.

Published in collaboration with the Morgan Library & Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Hujar: Contact (22 May – 25 October 2026), the volume becomes both an archival document and a reflection on photography as a form of connection, memory and presence.