American photographer Peter Hujar was BOTD in 1934. Born in Trenton, New Jersey to working-class parents, his father abandoned the family before he was born, and he was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents. In 1946, he moved to New York City to live with his mother, who bought him his first camera. Their relationship suffered due to her alcoholism, and he left home at 16, enrolling at the Parson School of Industrial Art in 1953. He formed a relationship with the artist Joseph Raffael, travelling together to Italy in 1957. With Raffael’s encouragement, he secured a Fulbright scholarship in 1963, allowing him to return to Italy with his other boyfriend Paul Thek, where he photographed the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. On his return to New York, he worked for commercial photographer Harold Krieger, and began socialising with Andy Warhol and Factory stars Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, appearing in several of Warhol’s experimental films. In 1967, he quit his job in commercial photography, and became involved with the gay liberation movement with his lover, the activist Jim Fouratt. After witnessing Stonewall Riots in 1969, he chronicled the Gay Liberation Front’s inaugural march, publishing his work in their magazineCome Out!. Later that year, he and the artist Stephen Lawrence published the short-lived journal Newspaper, featuring their own work alongside that of Warhol, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and Yayoi Kusama. He also worked on the photo series Orgasmic Man, a series of portraits of men on the verge of orgasm. After his separation from Fouratt, he relocated to New York’s East Village where he lived for the rest of his life, documenting the drag clubs, S&M bars and pierside cruising areas of his community. In 1975, he published his only book of photographs, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, and featuring portraits of Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, Divine, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. He had a brief relationship with David Wojnarowicz, remaining friends and mentoring Wojnarowicz’s development as an artist. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, he stopped working, dying later that year, aged 53. Largely overshadowed by fellow photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during his lifetime, his work grew in popularity following retrospectives in New York, Amsterdam and Switzerland. Now hailed as one of the 20th century’s most significant photographers, he was revered by younger artists including Nan Goldin for his commitment to photography as an art form and the humanism and intimacy of his work. Much of his back catalogue has been collected by singer Elton John, who has curated selections of his photographs in New York, San Francisco and London. He was played by Ben Whishaw in Ira Sachs‘ 2025 film Peter Hujar’s Day, recreating a one-day documentary project Hujar made with Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974.