The big picture: Iggy, before he went Pop

He was already gaining a reputation as a feral, hard-rocking provocateur that persists to this day, but in 1969, when Peter Hujar photographed Iggy Pop in a small studio overlooking Madison Square Park in New York, he still had the look of a sweet kid. In these images, which feature in a new book exploring Hujar’s contact sheets, those two aspects sit in fascinating tension.

Pop was 22 at the time and the Stooges, which he formed in Michigan a couple of years earlier, had just recorded their eponymous debut album; this photoshoot was commissioned by Elektra Records to promote it. Hujar, 13 years Pop’s senior, was building his own reputation as a portraitist with a gift for cutting through his subjects’ defences. “Hujar’s big thing was that you had to reveal,” said one of his sitters. “You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone.”

Pop was “exactly the kind of person that was very compelling to Hujar at the time”, says Joel Smith, author of Hujar:Contact and curator of an accompanying show at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. “He’s a ruffian, he’s shirtless and muscular, he’s unpredictable, and I think Hujar was attracted to the danger of a personality. There’s nothing ambiguous about him from a gender standpoint, exactly,” Smith goes on, “except for the way that he comports himself” in some of these frames.

Smith notes how the rocker stands “with his back to the camera with this beautiful sort of sway to his body”. It’s the confidence of that gesture and how it contrasts with some of the other images, which “look much more like a high school kid smoking a cigarette behind the convenience store”, that strike him as remarkable.

Two images of Pop ended up in the periodical Newspaper, including one of him with his back to the camera, but there were dozens of other shots from the session, which might well (assuming Hujar had his way) have gone on for hours. Now, thanks to Smith’s book, which draws from the 5,783 contact sheets that Hujar left behind after his death in 1987, we can get a fly-on-the-wall view of how those epic shoots unfolded.

Hujar:Contact by Joel Smith is published by MACK. The exhibition is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, until 25 October