Matthew Marks Gallery

In the tradition of Brassaï's Paris at Night, Hujar’s Night brings together forty-three hauntingly beautiful images of New York City. With these nighttime photographs Hujar joins Weegee and Berenice Abbott in the grand tradition of New York street photography. These pictures — most published here for the first time — provide a glimpse of a New York that has all but disappeared: a time before AIDS and a downtown before gentrification, populated by the late-night demimonde, crumbling cobblestones, and landfills, before the arrival of Battery Park City. In photographs of costumed Halloween partygoers, dilapidated domestic interiors, cruisy city parks, barren loading docks, and trash-strewn parking lots, Hujar has left behind his own unique record. Sometimes playful, often bleak, many of these photographs have an underlying sadness that is bound up in the palpable mortality of all Hujar’s subjects.