Peter Hujar
ICA, SW1

According to Peter Hujar, New York City is one of the loneliest places in the world. People live there by the million, but those in Hujar’s photographs, at least – friends and acquaintances from the 1970s intelligentsia and gay bohemian sub-cultures – look mentally and emotionally alone, alert to the delicate sorrows of the human condition.

Hujar, who died in 1987, was an important American photographer of the 1970s and early 1980s, whose work describes New York at a time when the city was financially impoverished but artistically rich. In this first British retrospective, the ICA has selected approximately 50 works, mainly portraits, many of them little known but others that will be recognised even by those who go blank at the name Hujar. Alongside them is a handful of quietly powerful nocturnal city landscapes and five of his 1960s photographs of the catacombs in Palermo, where skeletons were displayed fully clothed, their sad, hollow faces peering out into the gloom.

Mortality also haunted Hujar’s pictures of the living. Divine, for example, posed for Hujar in 1975, uncostumed and lying on his side, his head propped on his hand, the rest of his body floating across the frame like an overgrown putto. His shining bald head perfectly matches the swell of his paunch, but there is not an ounce of mockery here. He gazes into the distance as if contemplating his own mortality, and Hujar remains dispassionate, like a philosopher trying to understand his condition. With this empathy come tenderness and an acceptance of human frailty.

Hujar had been a fashion photographer in the 1950s and 1960s and had developed a clear aesthetic discipline by the time that he came to concentrate on his personal work. His idiom was always plain: black and white square-format photographs made on an old-fashioned 8x10 camera, which produced cool, classical composition and tonality.

Unlike Diane Arbus, Hujar did not think his subjects peculiar, and he made no effort to make them look so. Ethyl Eichelberger posed for him in 1979 as Auntie Belle Emme, dressed in silk ballgown and crinolines with long gloves. Two years later he photographed him again, this time just his face close up, undisguised and staring, exposing his languid and fine-boned self at the camera. Hujar’s lighting registers the deep shadows under his eyes, the hollow curve of his cheeks and the distinctive set of his brow. There is a terrible whisper of the Aids-related deaths to come, as if Hujar had a spectral gift of looking at a face and seeing the landscapes of suffering that may stretch ahead.

Susan Sontag lies back on a blanket, her hands resting behind her head, her eyes gazing into the distance, the image of Jewish intellectual brilliance. There is next to nothing behind her, nothing to distract us from the sense that all we need to get the measure of this woman is herself. And what is Daniel Schook doing sucking his big toe? This obscure form of self-pleasuring gives us a lattice of bare limbs, a shoulder, an arm and seemingly three legs, all warmly lit with just a hint of downy hairs on the smooth skin. Hujar has noticed the baby in Schook, with his pudding-basin haircut, his big round eyes and his uncertainty of what life has in store for him.

Hujar’s subjects trusted him not to take advantage of them, and he didn’t. Candy Darling, one of the most colourful members of Warhol’s gang, invited him into her hospital bedroom in 1974, weeks before she died of bone cancer. She lies on her hospital bed, surrounded by strangely morbid dark flowers, a single rose placed on her sheet. She knows that her heavy make-up, ballooning blonde hair and silky top are ineffective protection against her own mortality, but she stares at Hujar as if staring death straight on, her body still performing even as her mind wanders farther abroad.

It is a disturbing and painful portrait, but quietly so, as if the picture is Hujar’s slow meditation on all the tangled elements that had made up this short life. A romantic might have dramatised her condition, but Hujar grants her dignity to help repair a little of the damage already done.

Robert Mapplethorpe, who was a generation younger than Hujar, is there, photographed masturbating naked on a bed, and Nan Goldin, who, like Mapplethorpe, was strongly influenced by Hujar, is there in spirit. Her muse, the artist Cookie Mueller, is seen in a 1981 portrait, one more damaged personality coolly appraising the man behind the camera while revealing the vulnerabilities and dilemmas of her own condition. Mueller was to die, like many of Hujar’s subjects – and like Hujar himself – during the Aids epidemic that began to sweep New York in the late 1980s.

Hujar was important as a portrait photographer because he provided a bridge between the New York art scene of the 1960s, characterised by the denizens of Warhol’s Factory, and those who were to come up in the later 1970s, people such as the sculptor Paul Thek, and the painter David Wojnarowicz.

Hujar also had a little-known talent for the kind of night photography of cities that we associate with Brassaï or Weegee. His urban landscapes reflect the condition of the city in the mid1970s, when New York was suffering in the wake of the oil crisis and when downtown was notorious as a playground of criminals and gay hustlers. His photograph of the Woolworth Building in 1976 is a subtle study of mystery and memory; but his shots of the deserted streets of the meat-packing district and other abandoned areas offer the kind of imagery of physical ruination to which he was frequently drawn.

Scattered in among the portraits and landscapes is a disjointed little group of photographs of animals, some dead and glassy-eyed, some ebulliently alive: the ones that stick in my mind are the severed cow’s head, and one curious goat standing up like a starlet on an abandoned tyre. It is an odd little group of refugees in a show that otherwise hangs together well.

Hujar neither wanted nor received much public recognition during his lifetime. In a world that pushes a great deal of Arbus and Mapplethorpe in front of our eyes, this small exhibition grants Hujar some of the exposure that he deserves.

Peter Hujar, ICA, The Mall, London SW1 (www.ica.org.uk), from today to Jan 28

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010