Portraits and Places
, Steve Turtell, with photographs by Peter Hujar
. Published by Palermo Publishing. Reading and conversation with Steve Turtell and Giulia Crispiani


Leporello hosts the presentation of Portraits and Places. Steve Turtell, poet, writer and friend of Peter Hujar, will read from his autobiographical essays and discuss them with Giulia Crispiani.

The book brings together six intimate essays offering a personal view of a New York that, fifty years on, feels both vivid and distant. From the first Gay Pride march to Frank Zappa’s thirtieth birthday party, to the end of a cherished friendship with Hujar during a trip to Mardi Gras, Turtell moves through friendship, queer life, memory and the city’s cultural circles.

The essays are accompanied by eleven photographs by Peter Hujar, including portraits of Charles Ludlam, Sheyla Baykal and the performers of the legendary Palm Casino Revue. Together, images and words compose a portrait of an era, a place and the people who inhabited it.

The evening follows the presentation on 6 November 2026 at Centro Pecci in Prato, curated by Michele Bertolino as part of BOOKS, a programme dedicated to contemporary publishing.

Steve Turtell is an American poet and writer. A friend of Peter Hujar, he experienced the artistic and queer scene of 1970s New York at close range. In the essays of Portraits and Places, memories of people, encounters and places become a meditation on friendship, loss and the ways in which lives endure through storytelling.

Giulia Crispiani (Ancona, 1986) is a writer, visual artist, editor and translator. She lives and works in Rome. She collaborates with NERO Editions, the Dutch Art Institute and bruno, and teaches at NABA Rome. Her work has been presented at institutions and non-profit spaces including Istituto Svizzero, Rome; Bulegoa, Bilbao; MAXXI Rome and MAXXI L’Aquila; Romaeuropa Festival; and the Center for Book Arts, New York.

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) was an American photographer. His intimate portraits, cityscapes and photographs of animals form one of the most distinctive bodies of work in late twentieth-century photography. Closely connected to the artistic and queer communities of downtown New York, he photographed friends, writers, performers and artists with remarkable intensity and tenderness.

Palermo Publishing is an independent publishing house founded by Michela Palermo in 2022, working between Italy and New York. It approaches publishing as a practice of proximity and dialogue, developed through close collaboration with artists, writers and archives. Its catalogue brings together photography, artists’ books and critical writing, extending each publication through readings, conversations, exhibitions and forms of circulation across independent bookshops and art-book fairs.