Photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording-angels of death.” Sontag could have been writing about Peter Hujar’s black-and-white portraits. In fact, she knew him well and in 1976 wrote an introduction to his coffee-table book Portraits of Life and Death. Living in the East Village from the 1960s to the 1980s, Hujar photographed his subjects up-close, perfectly poised, theatrical even, yet touched with enigma. His images came to define the gritty aesthetic of downtown New York. In 1987, Hujar died of complications from A.I.D.S. This is the first large-scale exhibition that takes in the full breadth of his later photography, beginning in 1976 when Hujar fell into a depression, and moving on to the devastating early years of the A.I.D.S. epidemic. —Elena Clavarino