Olivia McCall spent several weeks sorting through nine bankers' boxes of photographer Peter Hujar's contact sheets at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.

McCall, now a history of art Ph.D. student at Bryn Mawr College, completed that archival work as the Edith Gowin Curatorial Fellow in the Morgan's photography department from 2022 to 2024. The fellowship came before she began her doctorate, according to Bryn Mawr. Her research helped lay the groundwork for Hujar:Contact, a major exhibition that opened May 22 and runs through Oct. 25.

During the fellowship, McCall cataloged nearly 6,000 contact sheets, drafted the initial exhibition checklist and transcribed about 1,000 entries from Hujar's negative registers. Hujar called those registers "job books." They logged every photo session the artist conducted from 1954 to 1986. McCall researched each entry to identify subjects, locations, events and dates.

She also revised the collection's finding aid and contributed to the exhibition catalog.

"The contact sheets were his working documents that bear his annotations; they provided him the first glance of what he had captured with his camera, from which point he would ultimately choose what to print," McCall said.

The exhibition, organized by Joel Smith, the Morgan's Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography, features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements. The Morgan acquired Hujar's collection of over 5,700 contact sheets in 2013.

Hujar died in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia at age 53. He began filing contact sheets and assigning job numbers at 21 and is best known for photographing New York's downtown art scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Aperture magazine called the show a follow-up to the Morgan's 2018 exhibition Speed of Life.

McCall said she chose Bryn Mawr in large part to work with Lisa Saltzman, who holds the Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art and serves as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Saltzman specializes in postwar and contemporary art and the theory of photography.

McCall's doctoral research focuses on artists who documented the AIDS epidemic and queer experience from the 1970s through the 1990s. A Barnard College graduate, she also serves as archive manager at the Peter Hujar Foundation.

She is not the only Bryn Mawr graduate student working in major museum spaces. Fourth-year Ph.D. student Hilde Nelson curated the exhibition Some American Dreams at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, funded by a McPherson Curatorial Fellowship from Bryn Mawr. That show was on display through June 14.

Hujar:Contact is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York through Oct. 25.