Farm animals were Peter Hujar’s first subjects. The photographer’s early years were spent with his Ukrainian mother and grandparents on a farm in central New Jersey, which exposed him to the emotionality of the natural universe. Decades before his lens moved between nocturnal vagabonds in the East Village and celebrities like Diana Vreeland, William Burroughs, and Fran Lebowitz, the young man realized the power of his eye. He could monumentalize any subject, even if it was an aloof cow or a dilapidated shack. The art dealer Gracie Mansion, who gave Hujar his final exhibition—a year before his AIDS-related death in 1987, at age 53—agrees that his gaze was revelatory. “When you look at his photograph of a blanket crumbled on the back of a chair,” she tells me, “you realize that it is actually a portrait of that blanket.” Ortuzar remounts “Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show” exactly four decades after that final show went up in Mansion’s gallery. The 70 photographs, installed to the artist’s specifications in a two-row grid at the tiny Alphabet City storefront, now occupy the Tribeca gallery’s soaring walls in the same grid formation. —Osman Can Yerebakan