I dont want wordpress to automatically format my code!

Ok, here’s my problem. If you take a look at my site and examine the code in the “latest work” area you will notice that each thumbnail image is wrapped in a paragraph tag. The reason for this is that to get that image to display, I am putting the code for the image in the excerpt of the article, the index page just displays the excerpt as a link to the article. However, wp is automatically putting it (the thumbnail) in a paragraph tag which normally would be fine, honever in this case, as it’s an image inside a link it makes my html invalid. I’d like to fix this if possible… Any ideas??