Born in 1934, Hujar grew up with animals. His father disappeared before he was born and his mother deposited him with her parents on a semirural New Jersey farm. Ukrainian was the household language, and Hujar seems to have spent more time with the local livestock than he did with other children. He very early picked up a camera. Like a tourist unnerved by culture shock in a foreign land, he could distance, control and communicate with the world through it.

By 11, he was living in Manhattan with his remarried mother, an unhappy arrangement. By the end of high school he was on his own, but with some valuable guidance from one of his teachers, a gay poet named Daisy Aldan (1918-2001), who encouraged his acute sense of difference. His 1955 studio portrait of her — Joan of Arc haircut, hand raised in self-amused benediction — is the show’s earliest picture and a true beauty.