Twin Palms Publishers issued Peter Hujar’s Animals and Nudes in April 2002. The volume appeared after Hujar’s death in 1987, bringing together two subjects that the publisher says he understood in terms of self-portraiture. The publisher presents this volume as a prelude to upcoming exhibitions examining his portraits of animals and nudes, which he considered self-portraits. Klaus Kertess contributed the introduction.

The publisher describes the photographs as a mirror of Hujar’s own body and milieu. A student of Lisette Model, an admirer of August Sander, and a friend of Diane Arbus, Hujar absorbed those inheritances yet, in the publisher’s account, made the work distinctly his own. The book is organized around his portraits of animals and nudes, both of which he treated as self-portraits, so the two subjects are presented together rather than as separate categories.

The publisher’s product page gives the format as eleven by thirteen inches, 136 pages, and 63 black-and-white plates, with an introduction by Kertess. The hardcover gives the photographs a substantial physical setting in which the two kinds of portrait can be considered together.

A reader can use this pairing to think about what a self-portrait might involve beyond an image of the artist’s face. Attention to another body can also express the photographer’s own ways of seeing and relating. The publisher frames the book as a prelude to later exhibitions of these portraits, anchored by Kertess’s text, and presents the photographs as a mirror of the photographer’s own body and milieu.