Another Man Hosts a Screening of Peter Hujar’s Day at the ICA

It is easy to forget that Peter Hujar, now canonised as one of New York’s great chroniclers of intimacy and marginal life, once lived with a monkish frugality that bordered on the absurd: washing his clothes in the sink, sustaining himself on canapés scavenged from parties. But Hujar suspected that recognition would come late. On Wednesday evening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Another Man marked that belatedness with a screening of Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs’ meticulous new film, with Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as the writer Linda Rosenkrantz.

Adapted from Rosenkrantz’ book of the same name, published in 2022, the film hinges on a single conversation in December 1974, as Hujar recounts, almost pedantically, everything he did the previous day. Drawn from a long-lost tape, the monologue turns errands, meals and irritations into a portrait of an artist’s inner life. It trades plot for precision, offering instead a study of friendship, attention and the conditions of making work in 1970s New York.

After the film was screened, a discussion was chaired by John Douglas Millar, whose biography of Hujar is forthcoming in 2029. He was joined by critic and curator Vince Aletti and master printer-cum-photographer Gary Schneider – the latter also the subject of a 1979 Hujar portrait that graced Another Man’s Summer/Autumn 2025 cover, a neat folding of life into work.

“He was like the Pied Piper,” Schneider recalled. “Charismatic, brilliant – almost a guru.” Aletti added with characteristic economy that Hujar offered “an education in looking”. Among those listening were Thurstan Redding, Jacques Testard, Harley Weir, Eva Yelmani, Pauline Daly, Isabella Burley, Maureen Paley, Sam Talbot, Jonas Glöer, Kiki Willems, David Musgrave, Ai Kamoshita, Annie Symons, Ed Quarmby, Oscar Ouyang, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing and Jess Hallett.