What happened to you yesterday? If your first thought is “not much,” consider the day that the photographer Peter Hujar had on December 18, 1974. At the time, Hujar’s friend Linda Rosenkrantz was working on a book about how people spend their time. She would ask her subjects to pick a day, take notes, and then meet with her the next day and describe their activities into her tape recorder. She talked to her mother, her sister, her cleaning lady, her fourteen-year-old cousin, the artist Chuck Close, and Hujar, who came to her apartment, on East Ninety-fourth Street, and narrated his yesterday, from wake-up (he slept through his alarm) to bedtime. In between, he had chatted on the phone with Susan Sontag, photographed a grumpy Allen Ginsberg for the Times, eaten Chinese takeout with the critic Vince Aletti, and taken two naps.
Rosenkrantz abandoned the project, and the tape was lost. A few years after Hujar died, in 1987, of AIDS, Rosenkrantz moved to California. The transcripts moved with her, idling among her papers. In 2018, the Morgan Library & Museum was mounting a major Hujar exhibition, prompting Rosenkrantz to donate her transcript to the institution, which holds his collections. Within months, a graduate student read it there and alerted a friend who has an indie press. In 2021, it was published as “Peter Hujar’s Day,” a perfect time capsule of gritty old bohemian Manhattan, half a century ago. The filmmaker Ira Sachs came upon a copy, in a gay bookstore in Paris. “When I finished the last paragraph, I thought, Oh, I should make a movie with this material,” he said recently.
Sachs was visiting the Morgan, just before “Peter Hujar’s Day” screened at the New York Film Festival, this fall. He was joined by Rosenkrantz, who is now ninety-one, with dyed-red hair cut into a bob with punkish bangs. In the film, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall play Hujar and Rosenkrantz, and the script is drawn verbatim from the transcript. (Sachs re-created details from Rosenkrantz’s old apartment, down to her spider plants and grandfather clock.) “It’s an extremely rare window into an artist’s circular thinking, which I really relate to,” Sachs said. “You go from confidence to insecurity, to this hope to that discovery, round and round and round, and you hope that something comes out of that.”
They were led into a wood-panelled reading room with a marble fireplace, once the parlor of J. P. Morgan’s son’s town house. From across a table, Joel Smith, the Morgan’s curator of photography, slid over a manila folder containing twenty yellowed pages of single-spaced type—the transcript. They flipped through. “How much of this tape is gone already?” Hujar wonders early on, worried about being “boring.”
“He was very conscious of the tape recorder,” Rosenkrantz recalled, in a Bronx accent. At one point, Hujar complains about a call from the artist Ed Baynard. (“He is totally insane.”) “Peter was always trying to get people off the phone,” Rosenkrantz said, smiling. “He tells these little white lies.”
