Palermo Catacombs #9

Photographer Peter Hujar formed part of New York East Village’s vibrant artistic and intellectual scene, where he forged close ties with counterculture writers, artists and performers such as Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling and Paul Thek. In his photographic series on the catacombs of Palermo, taken in 1963, Hujar offers a serene, intimate view of death. Far from being morbid or dramatic, his images capture the mummified bodies lying in the corridors of this ossuary as authentic portraits. 

Decades later, in 1980s New York, this reflection on loss, the body and memory took on a prophetic character. Hujar died in 1987 from complications associated with AIDS, and his work became a silent testimony to a generation decimated by the epidemic. The same intimate gaze he devoted to mummified bodies was later turned on portraying his sick and dying friends, many of them artists, writers and activists, likewise victims of HIV.

Raúl Martínez Arranz