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FINAL CALL TO ENTER AAP MAGAZINE SHADOWS: PUBLICATION AND $1,000 CASH PRIZES
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Photographer: Peter Hujar

By Peter Hujar, Paul Thek

Publisher: Primary Information
Publication date: November 2025
Print length: 192 pages
Language: English
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Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay away from nothing traces the restless, incandescent bond between two singular figures of the postwar art world. Moving between New York and Italy in the 1960s and 70s, the book unfolds through an intimate weave of letters, postcards, photographs, and fragile paper traces that survived them both. What emerges is neither simple biography nor nostalgic tribute, but a living record of a relationship shaped by ambition, desire, rivalry, and devotion.

Peter Hujar first encountered Paul Thek in a moment charged with possibility. Early portraits capture Thek before the myth fully formed: watchful, vulnerable, already theatrical. Thek’s letters, some written from a cargo ship bound for Europe, carry the urgency of youth and the hunger for reinvention. Rome becomes a crucible for their connection, a city where art, Catholic iconography, and sensuality intermingle—elements that would later surface in Thek’s sculptural environments and Hujar’s austere, psychologically piercing portraits.

As the correspondence progresses, so too does the complexity of their bond. Thek writes of money troubles, fleeting romances, grand artistic schemes, and the exhaustion of constant travel. His voice shifts from playful to melancholic, from seduction to self-doubt. Hujar answers less with words than with images. His photographs—whether made in Roman studios, on the beaches of Fire Island, or in the catacombs of Palermo—render Thek with a clarity that feels both tender and unsparing. Contact sheets and informal snapshots reveal moments of levity: shared jokes, staged passport photos, the casual intimacy of artists at ease in each other’s presence.

Placed in context with Thek’s monumental works such as The Tomb, the material gathered here underscores how inseparable life and art were for both men. Their exchange becomes a testament to creative partnership in its most volatile form—at once sustaining and destabilizing. In revisiting these documents, the book restores the human dimension behind two formidable oeuvres, honoring a connection that was as fragile as it was transformative.

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