Ben Whishaw is to star in Ira Sachs’ upcoming biopic of the late photographer Peter Hujar. The project marks the second major collaboration between the London-based actor and the American director following last year’s celebrated film Passages, in which Sachs directed Whishaw as his character navigated the movie’s fraught, erotically-charged love triangle.
Peter Hujar’s Day – which had apparently been scheduled to begin shooting in November 2023 but was delayed due to last year’s strikes – will, according to Deadline, be an “intimate” film about the renowned photographer. Hujar’s story promises to make a compelling film. He lived as he worked – unflinching, unsqueamish and uncompromising, equally drawn to the stark beauty of the human condition as he was to the danger of the abandoned West Side Hudson River piers (a notorious cruising location). As part of the febrile downtown New York art scene of the 70s and 80s, Hujar moved in circles among the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz and Diane Arbus. His arresting black and white portraits depict luminaries of the queer, bohemian art world of downtown Manhattan, from Divine to Fran Lebowitz, John Waters and Susan Sontag and many, many more.
Despite being a leading light in the city’s cultural landscape, the prolific image-maker only posthumously achieved the kind of acclaim he deserved in life. Three decades since he died of AIDS on November 26, 1987, Hujar is now talked of among the 20th century’s most revered photographers and, among those who knew him, as a captivating and charismatic character. “Peter was a very arresting person,” recalled his friend Stephen Koch. “When you met him, you knew right away, this is not ordinary normal-normal, that he was very special, very focused, and clearly someone that people wanted to know.”