Certain things are expected of a working photographer. If the assignment is a social event? Pictures of smiling party-goers. A political campaign? Shots of the candidate kissing babies and pressing the flesh. A championship fight? Close-ups of the knockout blow.
All this went out the window when you hired Larry Fink.
In Larry’s work, a clenched fist is more likely to belong to a pillar of high society than a heavyweight champion. Presumably famous faces are cropped or obscured in shadow. Any captions would have to be punctuated with a question mark.
For more than 50 years, Larry remained steadfastly indifferent to journalistic convention. And that’s why his photographs are considered not just part of the documentary record but art.
He was a stalwart of Vanity Fair in the years when the magazine’s masthead also included Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Harry Benson, Mark Seliger, Jonathan Becker, Mario Testino, and Bruce Weber (though only he, Becker, and Newton would regularly turn up without an assistant).
The jobbing phase of his career appeared to be over when, in 1978, John Szarkowski, the legendary director of MoMA’s photography department, invited him to exhibit his work at the museum. Like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand before him, he had received the coveted Szarkowski seal of approval. Larry was now officially a Fine-Art Photographer.
Yet he kept on taking editorial work anyway. “I was always insecure, and anxiety-filled, and guilt-ridden because photography, by definition, is invasive,” he told an interviewer for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art earlier this year. Larry welcomed magazine work because it gave him “permission to photograph.”
Larry remained steadfastly indifferent to journalistic convention.
Once he was in, however, Larry would make himself comfortable, returning to the scene of an assignment again and again, minus a press pass and a clear objective. If asked what he was doing at a black-tie gala, Larry would inform curious guests that he was photographing “the archives of gaiety.”
When he got home, Larry would put the pictures in a box and forget about them. And there they would stay, for years, sometimes decades. The material for several of his earlier books was drawn from this hoard, but only with Hands On: A Passionate Life of Looking, out next year from Powerhouse, can we begin to take stock of Larry’s true output.
There is a tendency among contemporary photographers toward specialization: shooting only one’s own waifish friends, or one’s Weimaraners, or oneself.
Larry’s niche was whatever happened to be in front of him.
His work is unmistakable across all subjects, social classes, and zoological phyla—from debutantes to lumberjacks, pop artists to stockbrokers, matinee idols to praying mantises—for his impeccable sense of timing and composition, his feeling for “the geography of physiognomy,” and his openhearted attitude toward what his mentor, the Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model, called “the vicissitudes of humanity.”
“Every one of my pictures has something to do with empathy,” Larry told the Smithsonian in his inimitable Beat-inflected idiom. “The person, or the people in the midst of it all, I have to feel them, or feel myself in them, or feel them in myself, as we are all related, in some form, in many forms, by our emotions, and by our collisions, and collusions, and allusions, and illusions.”
Larry Fink was a two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a professor of photography at Bard College. He has had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. His work has appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, W, GQ, and The New Yorker. Hands On: A Passionate Life of Looking is available for pre-order
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-author of Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends