“Photography,” wrote Susan Sontag in the introduction to photographer Peter Hujar’s 1976 book Portraits of Life and Death, “converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also – wittingly or unwittingly – the recording-angels of death.”
Sontag’s seminal essay is reprinted in the catalogue – produced in the form of a newspaper – for Peter Hujar: Echoes, an exhibition at the 125 Newbury gallery in New York’s Tribeca neighbourhood. It could hardly be more fitting for a show that turns an unflinching eye on permanence versus evanescence and brings to mind TS Eliot’s lines: “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.”
