This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge.

Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography. Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz.

Peter Hujar, Eyes Open in the Dark, is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.

Peter Hujar (born 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.