Known for the sensitivity and emotional impact of his black-and-white portraits, American photographer Peter Hujar captured the revolutionary bohemia of 1970s and 1980s downtown New York. Since his career was cut short by a premature death from AIDS in 1987, the lensman's work has found recognition beyond his peers, as highlighted in a summer exhibition at London’s Maureen Paley gallery. “I was drawn to the intensity and soulfulness in his work,” says New Yorker photography critic and author of Peter Hujar: Love & Lust Vince Aletti, whose portrait hangs in the show alongside an off-duty Peggy Lee and a carefree John Cage. Hujar’s intensely intimate, unconventional approach (keeping his subjects entertained while shooting was a must) he wielded a huge influence over his close contemporaries, among them Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, who once noted: “His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way. Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh.” The male nudes in question were shot in Hujar’s East Village studio, some of which posthumously made the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Peter had a striking, magnetic presence,” adds Aletti. “He was a wonderful and difficult friend––generous and demanding; charming and terribly insecure; the life of the party and the first person to leave it.”

Peter Hujar is on show at Maureen Paley gallery, London, through August 24.