A forthcoming biopic on the late photographer Peter Hujar has cast its lead. British actor Ben Whishaw, best known for his role as Q in the recent James Bond franchise, will play Hujar in the film, which will be directed by American indie filmmaker Ira Sachs.  

The film, titled Peter Hujar’s Day, looks to be based on a 2021 book of the same name by Linda Rosenkrantz, which documents Hujar’s life and activities over 24 hours in 1974. The volume takes the form of a transcript of a conversation between the writer and photographer, who discussed Hujar’s day right down to its minutest detail (“I go and I make another cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with raspberry jelly and now I’m going to call Allen Ginsberg,” and the like). 

The movie, Sachs told Indiewire, is “about the photographer… and his friend Linda in December of 1974 in New York City. This is a film about what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money.” 

Peter Hujar, Christopher Street Pier (2) (1976). © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery.

Though trained in commercial photography, Hujar, by the 1960s, had forewent a flourishing commercial career to pursue art. He turned his lens toward the city’s downtown and queer cultures, unflinchingly documenting their complexities in stark, intimate black-and-white images. Some of his most seminal photographs were compiled in 1975’s Portraits in Life and Death, which featured still lifes, cityscapes, and portraits of Susan Sontag, John Waters, and William Burroughs. 

In his day, Hujar formed friendships with peers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus; more notably, his relationship with David Wojnarowicz helped inspire the latter younger artist’s practice. “Everything I made,” Wojnarowicz remembered, “I made for Peter.” 

However incisive and potent his work, Hujar was never widely recognized for it in his lifetime (his 1975 book, for one, sold poorly). But decades on from his death from AIDS in 1987, his reputation has only grown, helped by a slate of publications and shows including the touring retrospective, “Speed of Life” (2017–19). Of this revival, Sachs’s biopic is a part.  

Peter Hujar’s Day will mark Whishaw and Sachs’s second collaboration, following Passages (2023), a romantic drama centered on a gay couple rocked by betrayal. Whishaw is currently on the BAFTA’s 2024 Supporting Actor longlist for his work on the film. 

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – It was the photo below on SnapJAX of a woman sitting in the intricate branches of a California coral tree that motivated this latest story. I found the man who took the picture and uncovered he had quite the story to tell himself.

Andre Mills is a Navy veteran and father to eight kids, gentle, thoughtful and creative.

“I took my first picture in Spain, and I was hooked. And I’ve been taking them ever since,” Mills said.

That was in 1989, five years before photography became a lifeline for Mills.

“No knock on doctors, but that’s my therapy, taking photography is my therapy,” Mills said.

Though he has needed all the help he’s been given. Mills suffers from PTSD and also a traumatic brain injury from his time in the military. He was blown off the flight deck by jet exhaust from an F14. Mills landed down on the catwalk unconscious.

“The only thing I remember was waking up down in medical with this big knot the size of my fist on the back of my head,” Mills said.

He was determined to overcome what could have been a life-ending injury.

“I grew up, I had dyslexia. That’s hard to get over. So pretty much all my life people tell me, I can’t do something. I’ll show you that I can,” Mills said.

He said that after the accident, when his neurologist said he wouldn’t be able to handle college, he showed him as well.

“So once I finished college, two and a half years, with my bachelor’s in English and a minor in sociology, I made a copy of my degree. And I went and gave it to him. And I said, ‘You said I couldn’t do it.’ And he’s no longer my doctor,” Mills said.

Now, he’s constantly seeking peace and that’s how he stumbled on the picture that he posted on SnapJAX. The woman was meditating in this tree and that’s something Mills does for an hour daily. It’s a self-care routine that’s taught him patience and resilience.

“If you allow people to push your buttons in your life you’re gonna be miserable. So you got to stay away from people like that and enjoy life. Like the pictures, you never see that moment again. So why let somebody ruin this moment, and it’s gonna mess up your next moments in life so no, you can’t let people get to you,” Mills explained.

This story reminds us not to sweat the small stuff — and it’s all small stuff. What I’m learning is there’s always a beautiful story behind a beautiful picture.

“Since the explosion I feel like a glass of water that overflows constantly,” wrote Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos on August 20, 2020. A week earlier, a monumental blast — created by the ignition of large amounts of seized ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse since 2014 — destroyed a large part of the port of Beirut, leaving more than 200 people dead and injuring some 6,000 others. For Boulos, only her camera could stem the flow of anger and despair.

In her debut photobook, “What’s Ours,” Boulos traces a decade-long period of turmoil in Lebanon, from 2013 to 2023, during which corruption, an economic crisis and conflicts over women’s rights have pitched the population against its government. In 2019, people took to the streets in what became known as the 17 October Revolution.

Boulos’ photographs and the accompanying journal entries featured in the book detail the turbulence — demonstrations, riot police, fires and fights — but also explore Lebanon’s exuberant and youthful subcultures and the ardent push for change. “Before October 2019, I felt like we were in a dead end. Everything was silenced, oppressed, and normalized,” Boulos, who is based in Beirut, said in an email interview. “The start of the revolution was a collective awakening.”

“What’s Ours” — the title is a statement not a question — references the fight for inalienable human rights: freedom for one’s body and speech. Boulos, who joined legendary photography collective Magnum Photos in 2021, emphasizes the struggle in visually arresting ways: tear gas blows through city parks, a woman stands in the blown-out window of her apartment. Boulos photographs soldiers, fire fighters, protesters, as well as Lebanese flora and butterflies.

She too is a paradox: an introvert with an eye for upheaval. “As a person who can literally spend months in my room, in my own world, and who has difficulties encountering the ‘real world’, photography is the perfect medium for me,” she said, explaining that people, sounds, lights and smells can overwhelm her. “Photography is a way of exteriorizing my thoughts and organizing my mind.”

Balancing art with risk

Boulos was born in Beirut in 1992 and, as a child, dreamt of becoming an illustrator (like her mother) or a musician. Her interest in photography came in her mid-teens. “I met a girl at school who became one of my closest friends, she had this sophisticated camera and I fell in love with the medium,” she said. Boulos’ photographs have since appeared in Time, Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines.

Sex and danger collide in her compositions. “I think that sexuality is still taboo in the entire world, and any sexuality that is not heteronormative is oppressed in the entire world too,” Boulos said. While Lebanon is relatively liberal for an Arab country, homosexuality remains illegal. Members of its queer community walk a tightrope of acceptance and feature in many of Boulos’ most striking images: The cover of “What’s Ours,” for example, features two women kissing. A tight frame of faces — eyes closed, immersed in one another — the shot crops out all external forces.

In another picture, two naked men embrace on a foggy mountainside, lit up by a gloriously purple night sky. These images of couples are “collaborations” with their subjects, stated Boulos adding that she, “became very aware of the importance of consent.”

But such pictures also come with risks. “In 2023 there have been campaigns and attacks against LGBTQ+ communities in Lebanon and this is the main reason why we are not distributing the book in Lebanon; in order not to put anyone in danger,” says Boulos.

Her photographs are abrasive in other ways. Textures — shattered glass, cracked concrete, bandages — create tactile compositions. Similarly, Boulos employs an often shocking, sometimes accentuated palette: blood and tattoos color a man’s torso, lipstick scars a woman’s face, a rescue worker in a reflective vest prays amongst the rubble.

And she finds beauty in the chaos. “It is important for me to look for tenderness,” Boulos explained. “I think it is a coping mechanism, a way of resisting and hanging on to desire and magic.” In one gentle shot, a tiny yellow flower sits cradled in the fragile palm of her grandmother’s hand.

Such optimistic aspects are hard to find in light of the Israel-Hamas war, she noted. “(It) has made me question everything, including my approach as a documentarist. I realized one of the things I do while representing Lebanon and the region is humanizing us through personal stories. I am naturally interested in documenting personal stories, but I am tired of trying to prove to the world that we, as Arabs, are human too.”

Eschewing didactic captions, “What’s Ours” instead features extracts from Boulos’ journals and snippets of conversations as well as a quote from Lebanon’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish: “And we don’t dream of more than a life like life itself.”

Does Boulos, the shy revolutionary, have faith that profound societal change is coming? “Hope is not one of the notions I think about in my life,” she observed, adding that, both in regard to intimacy and politics: “I think more about resistance and liberation.”

Myriam Boulos: “What’s Ours” is published by Aperture.