‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde

He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius

‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”

This week, the picture of a 24-year-old Lebowitz smoking a cigarette, slightly slumped, in a white shirt and tight white trousers on the arm of a settee, goes on show at the Venice biennale, alongside the 40 other pictures from Portraits in Life and Death. Twenty-nine of them depict artists, writers and performers Hujar knew and admired from the downtown scene of 1970s New York – many of them reclining in a state of reverie that seems completely un-posed. There’s the writer Susan Sontag, supine on a bed with a pensive expression; the drag artist and underground film star Divine off duty and resting on some cushions; nightclub dancer TC, topless and drowsily seductive; poet and dance critic Edwin Denby with his eyes meditatively closed, his wrinkles mirroring the rumpled duvet behind him.