Between 1954 and 1986 Peter Hujar noted more than a thousand photo shoots in small ledgers he called job books. Those notebooks, together with the contact sheets made alongside them, now form the core of an archive at the Morgan Library & Museum, and they are the substance of Hujar: Contact, a 364-page volume published by MACK in 2026 in association with the Morgan.

The sheets show a working photographer’s range: crowds at protests, damaged relics, farm animals. Portraits dominate. Hujar returned most often to the artists, writers and downtown figures whose circles overlapped with his own, and the strips of frames record how a sitting actually proceeded — the adjustments, the false starts, the moment when a face settles.

Joel Smith’s critical texts establish a chronology of the contact sheets, tracing an artist who experimented and refined rather than arrived fully formed. Olivia McCall’s transcriptions and annotations of the job books give each session its dates, sitters and circumstances, so the images stay anchored to a working life instead of floating free as icons. The sequence matters as much as any single frame.

Among the material are the earliest iterations of portraits that later became widely known — Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, Gary Indiana, Fran Lebowitz, Paul Thek — alongside many images published here for the first time. Read together, the sheets carry the cultural politics of the period and the upheavals in gay life that the words Stonewall and AIDS compress.

For collectors, the appeal is documentary rather than speculative: a book assembled from primary material, edited with a museum’s rigor, and issued alongside an exhibition at the Morgan (22 May–25 October 2026). It belongs with anyone who studies how photographs get made, or who wants a sustained record of a New York milieu and the photographer who kept its company.