The scarcer cloth issue of the only book published in Hujar's lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death, consists of photographs of artists, writers and performers active in New York's downtown scene between 1974-75, many of whom were his friends. Following these portraits are photographs he had taken in Sicily ten years earlier in the Roman Catholic catacombs beneath Palermo. In her introduction, Sontag writes that the subjects appear to meditate on their own mortality. 'The Palermo photographs - which precede these portraits in time - complete them, comment upon them...' Within ten years, a number of them, including Hujar, would die from AIDS-related complications. Whilst relatively unrecognised at the time, Hujar greatly influenced his contemporaries and later generations of photographers who lived and photographed alternative lifestyles, such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin.

First edition; 4to (276 × 250 mm, 10¾ x 9¾ in); black-and-white photographs; violet endpapers, photographer Machiel Botman's ownership signature at front, light fading, wear to hinges, grey cloth-covered boards, titles to spine in grey and to upper side in white,, fading to edges, light wear, white photo-illustrated dust-jacket, printed in black, wear to extremities, rubbed, spine lightly toned, head and foot of spine strengthened with tape on verso, a very good copy; [96]pp.