Touring the fairs, galleries and even the Venice Biennale itself this year, we were surprised by the array of portraits on display, in photos or paintings, of old masters who have fallen into oblivion. The phenomenon is accompanied by several recent publications on the subject. What is the reason for this new interest in the genre? Like everything on the market, it is a tren, as was Pop Art, Surrealism or Geometric Art. We will see how long it lasts, but for now we have the opportunity to have a diverse offer to visit.

It is true that many exhibitions go unnoticed but others, due to the curatorship, the montage and obviously the artist, remind us that the portrait is a genre that transcends the medium that contains it. An example of this concept are the celebrity photos of Peter Hujar (USA, 1934-1987), who could deeply penetrate the psychology and sensitivity of the subjects.

The exhibition we visited was called Portraits in Life and Death and was a compilation of shots of celebrities belonging to the cultural circle of New York in the seventies, such as the writers Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz.

A very young Sontag is presented in a relaxed pose, without looking at the camera, a shot taken twenty years before the publication of her wonderful novel The Volcano Lover. The writer and actress Fran Lebowitz was portrayed from the front, without makeup, confirming her non-binary gender.

All photos are in black and white and belong to the book that bears the same name of the exhibition: the “living” are the celebrities and the “dead” are the mummified bodies found inside the Cappuccini Catacombs in Palermo (Sicily).

In his rollercoaster of a life, Hujar (he died at the age of 53) produced an (extremely notable corpus of photos, although the most significant shot was that of Candy Darling on her Deathbed, which belongs to the Tate Collection in London and where we see the famous transgender star in her hospital bed, surrounded by flowers, days before she died at age 29.