Published by MACK in 2021, The Shabbiness of Beauty brings Moyra Davey’s new photographs into a charged conversation with little-known images drawn from Peter Hujar’s archive. Rather than treating Hujar’s work as a closed historical legacy, Davey selects, answers, and redirects it, creating a book whose central subject is not influence in any simple sense but the friction and intimacy of looking across generations.

The photographs are arranged as a visual dialogue: bodies, animals, interiors, seascapes, and urban or rural landscapes recur in altered forms. New York provides a spiritual anchor, while images extend toward Quebec and Pennsylvania. Nudes appear beside unruly chickens; the human body approaches the condition of terrain; city and country, human and animal, meet through related tensions of surface and form. Across these pairings, physicality and sexuality are handled with wit, tenderness, and a sharp awareness of the image’s construction.

The book’s distinctive force lies in the difference between its two photographic sensibilities. Davey’s self-aware postmodernism meets Hujar’s humanism and his embrace of darkroom manipulation. Their images do not simply illustrate one another: they admire, tease, and intensify one another, with contrasts that remain visible rather than being smoothed into a single style. The resulting sequence offers a personal and angular way of encountering both artists, allowing unfamiliar archival material and newly made work to alter each other’s meaning.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a carefully shaped collaboration between archive and response, historical memory and contemporary re-reading. Its 128-page hardback form gives that exchange a focused setting, while the pairing makes the volume more than a survey of either artist alone. It is a considered account of how photographs can remain alive when placed in argument with one another.