As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night. — Dorothy Parker
PETER: I think I just slept through the alarm. I set it for 8:30 because at nine o’clock Jacqueline de Mornay from Elle magazine was coming. She was staying at the Chelsea and her English was not too good and she was coming for pictures of Lauren Hutton. So at nine o’clock the phone rings, it was Jacqueline. She says is it good to come in 20 minutes? I say yes, it’ll be perfect, and I hop out of bed. I’m really tired.
On December 19, 1974, enlisted by writer Linda Rosenkrantz to describe the previous day for posterity, Peter Hujar accidentally captures an entire world in a few hours of considered, often humorous, recollection. Now given elegiac form by Ira Sachs in his moving new film Peter Hujar’s Day, the two close friends sit and talk and walk around Rosenkrantz’s Manhattan apartment, tape recorder running, and the photographer starts to focus:
PETER: I got dressed, I put the same clothes that I have on now, actually.
LINDA: You have to describe what they are.
PETER: Boots that have inside the heel it’s so bad that I have two folded footpads. Anyway, I then got the coffee water on and then the phone rings again and it was Susan Sontag who said are you awake? Then she heard the radio and said oh yes.
On assignment from the New York Times to photograph Allen Ginsberg, Hujar details a comedy of manners. Ginsberg, prickly, is adamant that he’s not going to sit for a “portrait,” so they hit the streets of the Lower East Side, a crumbling war zone in the seventies. Ginsberg suggests posing inside of a burnt out store:
LINDA: Is he still suspicious? Has he warmed up?
PETER: No. So then I said it looks real arty.
LINDA: No wonder he didn’t warm up.
Starring Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz, who indelibly capture the playfulness and tenderness of close friendship, Peter Hujar’s Day takes place during a time when the full embrace between the art world and the photography world—each with its distinct galleries and publications—was still tentative. In fact, 1974 was the year of Hujar’s first solo exhibition, and in the film he discusses what he likes or dislikes about shooting, printing, and mounting. At one point he tells Rosenkrantz that he wants his work to completely stand on its own, without a star subject in sight. She affirms this desire: “I find the star thing very superfluous.” Yet Hujar’s astute takes on Fran Lebowitz, Lisa Robinson, Robert Wilson, Vince Aletti, Janet Flanner, Glenn O’Brien, William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Frank Lima, Ed Baynard, and Maurice Hogenboom ripple across the film like a lost memory play as the shadows grow long in the apartment and the world-in-a-day comes to a close.
Rosenkrantz’s conversation with Hujar was lost for decades. Then, in 2019—thirty-two years after the photographer’s death from AIDS-related pneumonia—Rosenkrantz found a transcription and donated it to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Two years later, Jordan Weitzman and Francis Schichtel edited and published the conversation in book form, colloquialisms intact. The film version is now playing, with the director making select Q & A appearances. See info and links below.
PETER HUJAR’S DAY
Written and directed by Ira Sachs
Now playing
Laemmle Royal
11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles
Q & A with Ira Sachs and Linda Rosenkrantz
Sunday, November 9, at 5:10 pm
AMC Burbank Town Center 8
201 East Magnolia, Suite 345, downtown Burbank
amctheatres.com/peter-hujars-day
Q & A with Ira Sachs
Sunday, November 9, at 7:15 pm
amctheatres.com/peter-hujars-day-ira-sachs-in-person
Peter Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz quotations from Rosenkrantz, Peter Hujar’s Day, ed. Jordan Weitzman and Francis Schichtel (Montreal: Magic Hour Press). Copyright © 2021 Linda Rosenkrantz and Magic Hour Press.
magichour.press/linda-rosenkrantz-peter-hujars-day
Dorothy Parker quotation from “New York at 6:30 PM,” Esquire, November 1964, © Esquire and the Estate of Dorothy Parker.
Ira Sachs, Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), from top: Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw (2); Whishaw; Peter Hujar’s Day poster; Whishaw and Hall; Whishaw.
Stills and poster courtesy of Janus Films.
