Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay away from nothing centers on the close relationship between photographer Peter Hujar and artist Paul Thek. Bringing photographs into conversation with their private correspondence, it treats friendship not as a biographical footnote but as the book’s principal subject: a sustained exchange through which two artistic lives become newly legible.

More than fifty letters and postcards are reproduced alongside drawings and other ephemera. Poetic, everyday and frequently melancholic, these documents preserve changes of mood, practical details and intimate forms of address that a conventional chronology might flatten. Their inclusion gives the photographs a different kind of context—not a definitive explanation, but an adjacent record of attention, distance and continuing contact.

The pairing joins two distinct practices. Hujar is represented through photography, while Thek worked across painting, sculpture and installation. By placing images beside written and drawn material, the publication allows correspondence and artwork to function as parallel records. The result occupies a productive space between photobook, artists’ archive and documentary portrait, with the surviving traces of the relationship carrying as much weight as any retrospective account.

Published by Primary Information in 2025, the 192-page volume deserves attention for the concentration of its archival perspective rather than for any claim of rarity. For collections concerned with photography, artists’ correspondence or the social worlds surrounding artistic production, it offers a focused point of contact between Hujar’s image-making and Thek’s broader practice. Its distinction lies in showing how photographs and ordinary communications can illuminate one another without collapsing the ambiguities of either life or work.