Watch The First Clip of ‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Starring Ben Whishaw
The first clip of Peter Hujar’s Day has been released, the biopic starring Ben Whishaw as iconic photographer Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1987.
Peter Hujar’s Day, an intimate movie directed by Ira Sachs about the life of the late American photographer, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January.
The movie was reportedly one of the few films to find a U.S. distributor at Sundance and received positive reviews — with critics applauding it as the “best film” of the festival.
Peter Hujar’s Day takes place in one day in New York City in December 1974. According to Variety, the movie consists entirely of Hujar having a conversation with writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall) in which he recounts everything he did the day before.
Rosenkrantz had instructed Hujar to write down everything that happened to him on December 18, 1974, and to show up the following day at her apartment in Manhattan, where she would ask him about the day in detail and tape-record their conversation about it.
Forty years later, in 2021, a transcript of the conversation between the writer and photographer, who discussed Hujar’s day right down to the minutest detail, was published by Rosenkrantz as the book Peter Hujar’s Day. Director Sachs developed Rosenkrantz’s book into a feature-length movie.
Last week, the filmmakers released the first clip of Peter Hujar’s Day, which features a conversation between the photographer and Rosenkrantz as they discuss their differing views on stardom and artists.
The Life and Work of Peter Hujar
Today, Hujar is recognized as among the greatest American photographers of the late 20th century.
He is best known for his intimate, powerful, and piercing black-and-white portraits of luminaries of the queer, bohemian art scene of downtown Manhattan between the late 1960s and the onset of the AIDs plague in the 1980s.
Some of Hujar’s most famous photographs include Orgasmic Man (1969) which became the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel A Little Life — as well as the final portrait of transgender actress and Andy Warhol muse Candy Darling on her deathbed at 29-years-old.
In Hujar’s arresting image, Darling lies on the hospital bed where she was dying of lymphoma in 1974. Darling gazes at the camera with a full face of makeup with her head sideways on a pillow, her arm vampishly raised, and an elegant rose ostentatiously placed beside her. Hujar later wrote that Darling was “playing every death scene from every movie” during this final photo shoot.
Hujar also shot portraits of cultural icons such as Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag, John Waters, and legendary drag queen Divine.
However, Hujar’s work only received marginal recognition during his lifetime. It was only after his death of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of 53, that his photographs began to receive the critical esteem they deserved.
