CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/18/2025

A profound document of art, love and friendship in ‘Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay away from nothing’

Some books, you flip through and you know immediately what they are. Others, you flip, you stop, you read, you look. You start over, emotions rising. You remember the most poetic moments in your own life. You remember fascination, infatuation, love, young friendship. Then also complexity, distance, yearning. Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay away from nothing, releasing this week from Primary Information, is a book that sparks all of these deep feelings of future and past. Collecting contact sheets and photographs—both candid and composed—by Hujar alongside previously unpublished letters, postcards, drawings and items of ephemera by Thek, this deeply moving book presents a record of friendship, romance and creation across decades and continents. In his Afterward, Andrew Durban describes the years when both men were undertaking tremendous artistic leaps, “often in orbit of one another. Thek became a celebrated—if virtually unsellable—artist, and Hujar established himself in commercial photography. On his way to becoming one of the greatest portrait artists of all time, Hujar often photographed Thek, using him as a kind of testing ground for ideas.… His pictures captured the man who was his friend, lover, and brother, as well as Thek’s art. …Tender and introspective, these photographs are the most substantial documentation of a work now lost.” Conversely, “Thek regarded Hujar as more than a correspondent—he was a kind of sounding board. In his letters to Hujar, Thek hashed out ideas … confessed his deepest feelings about his work and state of mind. For a while, Thek craved any word from Hujar; a letter from him, especially when Thek was living abroad, grounded him. ‘You are a good strong brother,’ he wrote to Hujar, ‘and I take you with me wherever I go.’”