Stay away from nothing

“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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The Inner Passage

My first exposure to the idea that the land was not merely some immutable background people were operating against came from the very place I grew up in: the part of the city where I was born had been wrested (“reclaimed”) from the sea. As a child, this fascinated me. The soil on which I was standing had at some stage been part of the ocean that was now contained by the dikes at the beach. And people had done this. What looked as it had existed forever had in fact not.

Over the course of my life, I have come back to this particular aspect of the relationship human beings have with the land time and again, mostly because I was trying to imagine the lives of the people who had in some fashion been engaging in it.

Inevitably, the work must have come at a sacrifice, possibly a major one. For example, it is estimated that during the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal (now located in russia), between one fifth and one fourth of the 125,000 prisoners who had to dig the canal with their bare hands died.

While swimming in a canal called New Cut in South Carolina, Virginia McGee Richards found herself wondering about its origins. “Naively, I thought that discovering New Cut’s origin story wouldn’t require much research grit,” she writes in the afterword of her new book The Inner Passage, “but there was no written history of New Cut anywhere.”

The eventual discovery would reach White Sea-Baltic Canal dimensions: “The few historical documents that I found revealed that my swimming hole at New Cut had been carved from the earth by enslaved Black men.” It would set in motion the photographic work that resulted in the book.

As it turned out, the new canal had not only served the colonialists/enslavers, it had also played a role for the enslaved people themselves. “Over a century before the advent of the Underground Railroad to the north,” the photographer writes, “enslaved Carolinians planned and carried out their own escapes by paddling three hundred miles southward on the Inner Passage”.

There is a list with such occurrences at the end of the book, listing enslaved and indentured people escaping in boats. It starts in 1671 with Dennis Mahoon and two others and ends in 1825 with eleven adults for whom only first names are given (“Jemmy, Adam, Keating, …”) and “5 children”. No dates were found for Mowby and Dunmore who also escaped at some stage.

The moment you know something about whatever it is you’re looking at — the land, a person, an item, it becomes charged: you want to see what you know in what is in front of you. But the surfaces of the land, people, or things do not reflect anything other than the light that falls upon them. Still, it’s impossible not to see more — and to find traces of that which invisible in what is visible.

This is where and how photography acquires its own power. Photography is not interesting because it shows things as they are. Photography is interesting because we see or feel something reflected in them. It is the photographer first who picks up on the traces of what they are looking for, and these discoveries are then transmitted to the viewers.

For her work around New Cut, Virginia McGee Richards used using a large-format camera and the wet-plate collodion process. The process is difficult to control, especially when used out in the field. It lends itself to all kinds of artifacts and possible imperfections. For me, its imagery evokes the swampiness that I imagine to be so pervasively present along New Cut and its immediate environs.

It would go much too far to claim that The Inner Passage is being brought to life by the inclusion of its portraits. Still, if the landscapes and the photographs of houses and other structures lay the fuse, the portraits light it. Next to the portraits, there are the names of the sitters and their larger place in the story.

Looking at another person’s photographic likeness throws a wrench into how we approach photography. After all, the person in the picture might talk back and offer something that differs from what we project onto them.

For many of the portraits, there also are the sitters’ words, which reflect how they see what we viewers, possibly far removed from the scene, think we encounter. “I hear and understand the history of the Civil War differently,” Hilary Green says, “because I sat on porches and listened to the oral stories from my kin.”

“I remember sitting on my grandfather Asbury Mitchell’s lap when I was a boy in the 1950s,” Lloyd Mitchell remembers, ” he was an old guy — about eighty or ninety years old.”

And so it turns out that the traces of those enslaved people who had to dig that canal live on not just in the artifice they created in the land. It also lives forth in their descendants who walk among us (at least if you live in the United States).

In the end, it will always be people’s stories that will move us more than monuments set in stone or dikes piled up near an artificial waterway.

We have to listen to those stories because only then will we have an opportunity to do better than those who came before us.

Recommended.

The Inner Passage; photographs and text by Virginia McGee Richards; essays by Imani Perry and James Estrin; 152 pages; The MIT Press; 2026

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1804

I have lived in the United States for almost half of my life, but I doubt that I will ever fully understand its intricacies. This is not because the US is more complex or sophisticated than any other country. It’s because there is a difference between taking in a world through unfiltered immersion (as I did growing up in Germany) and through dedicated (and thus filtered) and willful exposure (as I’m doing now).

An easy and somewhat related way to express this is that after all of these years I still have a slight accent when speaking English (invariably described as either German or, and this is the other somewhat perplexing option, European [as if there were a European language]).

I’m probably not the best person to discuss photography made in Athens, Ohio, because I lack a lot of the cultural pointers that someone who grew up in the US would have. I understand some of the ideas behind, say, the Midwest or what is called the heartland; but there is no emotional connection whatsoever. Even with the one place in the US that I feel emotionally connected to (Boston, MA) I am still puzzled about many cultural aspects.

Furthermore, for all kinds of reasons I am deeply suspicious of pride that centers on locale, however wide one wants to cast that net. About 20 years ago, I lived in Pittsburgh, PA, a city whose inhabitants expressed their own pride in what I thought was an excessive fashion. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice enough city. Is it the Paris of the Appalachia, though? Well, I did spend a few months in Paris (France, not Texas), and I can report that, well, no. It’s not even that I like Paris that much, but let’s be realistic here.

With all of that said, I think that people who grew up in the United States and people like me will look at Rich-Joseph Facun‘s 1804 differently. In general, we all look at photography with different eyes. If we dive into what drives why we see what we think we see, we can learn a lot about ourselves (and, of course, about what’s in the photographs). But this plays out differently for different types of photography, and it plays out differently for different subject matters.

At the end of the book, there’s a short text that concludes with the statement that “1804 considers the ways in which heritage, socioeconomics, and youth culture are shaped by the dominant institution in an Appalachian town” (the dominant institution being Ohio University). I suppose in some fashion, I might agree with that, even though the statement is very broad.

What bothers me about the statement, though, is that it shoehorns the beauty of the work, in particular the portraits, into a very specific direction. As I outlined above, in part this is because for me, “Appalachian town” is not the kind of trigger that it appears to be for many people, a trigger that results in all kinds of predetermined ideas and conclusions.

When I moved to Pittsburgh, I encountered an interesting city. But I felt as if a lot of people were unable to see some of that beauty because they were too tied to seeing “Pittsburgh”, that very specific entity with its very specific history. I don’t mean to imply that one is necessarily better than the other. In fact, I do think that out of a dialogue between these two poles something marvelous might emerge (if we allow it to).

I suppose a different way of expressing the book would be for people to ignore where it was photographed (at least for a while) to see the photographs — the portraits, some of the other pictures feel like fillers — in ways that deviate from the kind of predetermined access they might otherwise have.

Especially in light of all of that which surrounds me and everybody else in the US right now (you will have to imagine me making a resigned and quite exhausted gesture with my arms all around me), I’m thinking that we need to see the people again — and much less the ideas that have come to dominate almost all of the discourse (if we even want to call all the shouting a discourse).

1804 makes me curious about the people in its pictures, and that’s a good thing at a time when every effort is being made to stifle people’s curiosity — and by extension their empathy — for each other.

Seen this way, the specificity of the selection of the people in the book — photographed in Athens, Ohio — actually is a bonus. It is true, you might not find exactly these kinds of people in Everett, MA or WA. But in order to see people for who they are, and in order for us to be able to see ourselves in other people again, we have to start somewhere.

Most of the encounters that led to the taking of the portraits appear to have been chance ones. Most of the encountered are young, their youth showing either in their slightly awkward display of a maturity that they not yet have (which I find endearing) or in not yet being able to fully hide their vulnerability the way people my age do (ditto).

These young people seem open to this world, which is sure to disappoint them soon enough. Maybe this time around, we — by which I mean the rest of us, the people who are older — can attempt to help them find less disappointment than we encountered?

After all, just because too many of us have become accustomed to their bitterness, a bitterness that in part is being driven by demagogues who exploit some of the ideas that go into, say, “Appalachian town”, that doesn’t mean that the next generation have to live through it, too.

I sense kindness behind the taking of the portraits in 1804. There’s tenderness.

Kindness and tenderness can be lost. But they can also be re-acquired, one little act at the time — whether it’s taking a stranger’s photograph, looking at a different stranger’s photographs, or any other gestures that accept a stranger the way they are.

1804; photographs and text by Rich-Joseph Facun; 116 pages; Liars Corner; 2025

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Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

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