Portraits in Life and Death (1976), inscribed

• Published: Da Capo Press, New York, 1976
• Contributors: Introduction by Susan Sontag
• Edition: First edition, first printing (softcover issue)
• Binding: Pictorial wrappers
• Pages: [91] pp.
• Dimensions: approx. 28 x 25 cm (11 x 10 in)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-306-80038-1
• Signature: Inscribed by Hujar on the half-title "To Al / with love xoxo" and signed.
• Condition: Near fine; light rubbing and toning, small bump to lower spine.

The only book Hujar published in his lifetime. Twenty-nine portraits of his circle, among them Susan Sontag lying on a bed, William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz and Candy Darling in her hospital bed, are followed by eleven photographs he made in 1963 in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, where the dressed dead line the walls.

The sequence is the argument. In her introduction, Sontag writes that Hujar understands every portrait of the living as also a portrait of the dead, and that the Palermo pictures complete the portraits and comment on them. Many of the sitters died young, Hujar among them in 1987, and the book reads now as a memorial to a world.

It has become one of the essential American photobooks and was reissued in 2024. Inscribed by Hujar "To Al / with love xoxo".