The Peter Hujar Archive & Foundation presents Peter Hujar’s Day, a new film by Ira Sachs starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in London to coincide with Frieze Week. Pace Gallery will dedicate its Frieze Master’s booth to Peter Hujar’s work.

In this richly cinematic work, Sachs transforms a real 1974 recording between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz into an intimate dialogue on art, solitude, and the fragile rituals that shape creative existence.

In the original tape, Hujar speaks candidly with his friend, reflecting on the small, often imperceptible moments that define an artist’s life. Across the span of a single day, he recounts encounters with contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Susan Sontag, alongside observations on the daily struggles and quiet ecstasies of living and working in downtown New York during the 1970s. Sachs’ adaptation honours the tenderness and complexity of that conversation, translating it into a study of time, temperament, and artistic interiority.

Whishaw and Hall inhabit their roles with extraordinary nuance, their performances unfolding in measured rhythm, where silence carries as much weight as speech. Through their voices and gestures, Peter Hujar’s Day becomes more than a portrait of a single artist: it becomes a meditation on an era defined by risk, authenticity, and the pursuit of beauty amid precarity.

Elegant and restrained, the film echoes Hujar’s own photographic sensibility, raw yet deeply humane. It captures not only the artist’s presence, but the atmosphere of a vanished New York: one of lofts, friendships, and the unguarded pursuit of meaning.

In Peter Hujar’s Day, Sachs has crafted a hauntingly intimate homage, a dialogue across time that reminds us how an artist’s day, once lived, can continue to speak.