“A picture is worth a thousand words,” Merriam-Webster states, is “used to say that it is often easier to show something in a picture than to describe it with words”. The adage is widely used, including by photographers trying to avoid writing or talking about their work. And effectively, it sets up a hierarchy, namely one in which pictures sit supreme whereas words struggle to do their job.
The actual reality is much more complicated — and interesting. Words and pictures typically do not compete. Instead, depending on context and use, one is used to supplement the other, such as, for example, when a menu in a restaurant includes pictures of dishes or when a newspaper uses photographs. But even the newspaper case is more complex, given that the photographs have captions (which serve the pictures) while they’re in support of articles (text).
You could also turn the sentiment of the famous phrase around and use it against pictures: a thousands words can have an openness that no picture could ever match. It seems to me that in our daily lives, we are very much aware of the different roles that can be played by words and pictures, not really worrying too much about one or the other. One, typically, serves the other, and that’s just fine as it is.
Things get interesting, though, when words and pictures become equal partners. In my experience, this is a nightmare scenario for many photographers. Many photographers (in particular the “art” ones) feel threatened by what text can do, probably because they worry that somehow, their photographs become diminished in the process.
It is as if somehow, photographer neither trust that their own pictures will simply hold their own, thank you very much, nor that their audience will be able to compute two seemingly different things at the same time. (Photography is the most insecure of all art media.)
Granted, Stay away from nothing was not published in order to look into whether or how pictures and words compete with each other. Instead, it shines a light on two extraordinary artists, Paul Thek and Peter Hujar who were friends and lovers — up until they grew apart. Still, it demonstrates the tricky relationship between words and pictures.
The book showcases letters written by Thek and sent to Hujar alongside photographs (mostly) taken by Hujar, with Thek being the subject.
The final photograph in the book, taken in 1975, might be the most well known one (even though of course I could be wrong). Included in Hujar’s first book, Portraits in Life and Death (which I reviewed here), it shows Thek in what I consider to be Hujar’s signature style — that glorious mix of seeing the other person for who they were while putting a fair amount of the photographer’s melancholy onto them.
“Plenty of photographs have survived,” writes Andrew Durbin in the afterword, “but no letters from Hujar to Thek, since Thek had a poor records of keeping hold of his belongings.” And so Thek’s words, handwritten or often typed up on any of the typewriters the artist could get hold of (e.g. “I am using an old dutch typewriter with everything in Dutch and so I think I am doinga pretty good job considering” in a letter from August 1962 [I am citing the spelling without corrections]), compete with Hujar’s photographs, many of them whole contact sheets.
At times, I found myself wondering whether I was really supposed to know some of the contents of these letters.
But are the words any more intrusive than many of the photographs? How is it that we often see words as being more intrusive than photographs? Or are photographs intrusive in a different fashion? How about those photographs of Thek masturbating or rather of Hujar photographing Thek masturbating (and who was the third photographer?)?
It is exactly because so much is missing — so much context, so much background information, so much that might shed more light onto these two people and their relationship as expressed in these letters and photographs — that Stay away from nothing shines so much. These letters and photographs reveal so much — and explain so little: what more can anyone interested in art (and these artists) ask for?
Inevitably, someone else’s life is always more interesting than one’s own, and possibly other people’s friendships are as well. It’s difficult to see what one has in one’s own life, especially now that the form of capitalism we have to live under has turned everything into a competition that needs to be spelled out in endless listicles.
Now, artists have to become performers, and entertainers, for their audience. Thek and Hujar were that as well, but only for each other. What unfolds in the book is the expression of the performance that ultimately ran its course, to end in 1975.
By describing their life together and with each other as a performance, I don’t mean to take anything away from what they had. The love and the pain were very real; and yet, I can’t help but notice a form of bravado running through it all (this late middle-aged straight writer might not be the ideal person to write about this, though).
Andrew Durbin also wrote The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, which at the time of this writing has not been released. For unrelated reasons, I have been thinking about what and/or how much I want to know about the lives of artists. For me, being told too much inevitably runs the magic of a life lived.
But then there is the thrill of seeing how someone extraordinary — or here: two extraordinary people — lived, and there can be much gained from knowing that as well. I guess once Durbin’s biography has been released, I will have to make up my mind on whether to read it.
Up until then, there is Stay away from nothing, which in many ways is ideal: it pulls back the curtain but in this very strange way, with Thek’s letters and Hujar’s photographs doing the talking, revealing some details while leaving many others unspoken.
Recommended.
Stay away from nothing — Paul Thek and Peter Hujar; edited by Francis Schichtel; 192 pages; Primary Information; 2025
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