Peter Hujar is known for being an integral part of the downtown New York community through the 70’s and 80’s. As a photographer he was brave, detailed and often uncompromising. These attributes made him admired by the artists, musicians, writers and performers around him in the clandestine pockets of NYC. Hujar was not widely recognized until after his death to AIDS in 1987. He left behind a complex and profound body of work; focusing on black and white portraits with piercing connections to his subjects, photography of animals and landscapes. At the time, his work was often overlooked due to his “difficult” nature and unwillingness to pander to the marketplace and institution of the art world. In his lifetime, Hujar did achieve a publication of a book in 1976 called Portraits in Life and Death. The photo book was an unusual sequence of portraits of Hujar's friends along side pictures of corpses in the catacombs underneath an Italian church. After his death, Hujar's work became widely recognized and viewed as some of the most influential work to come out of the downtown New York artist community.