Nothing is a whim, time stretches us fat and thin. Its evolution serves to address questions asked eternally and opens up avenues of uncertainty since, save for perhaps the objective sciences, answers are never sure.

Pictures are sure. They remain fixed in the moment they were seized; their reading is as always ambiguous, subject to the changing perceptions and intuitions bred by delusion or by experience.

Twenty-five years ago I had hope; now I have fortitude. The Sabatines are splayed across the Pennsylvania hills; John is dead; the family is hardly talking, if at all. The battle of bones and carcasses on Little Creek Road is gone, as is my relationship to that process.

On the other side, the debs and balls are still focused on impression—surely much of the noblesse of the older families is tarnished if not dead. The nouveau doesn’t shine backwards, only forwards, somehow hollow, arrogant and unsure.

So many ideas and energies are reactive, commercial, conservative—not proactive, aspirational, utopian; and at least in my American experience there is a narrowing of the soul. Expectations are lower, and the struggle for true justice has shifted to the status quo of Just Us.

I offer this book in its original sequence and essay, and with an older essay by the masterful and deeply consequential Max Kozloff. Plus an additional group of images from that era as a gift to those who believe that time stopped deftly in a magnetic moment lives on … and on. Thank you.

— Larry Fink

The Lights and Darks of Living It Up (From Social Graces)

So routinely does photography establish banal genres of subject and style that a great deal of valuable turbulence is sometimes released when they are violated. Increasingly, workers seek the tender surfaces of fashion photography, for instance, or advertising, make their incisions, and let the unctuous content squirt out. Some of the iconography and certainly the husk of the older mode remain, but a disturbing, ill-defined expressiveness sets in.

One of the modes in which this has happened is the photography of parties, balls, club dances or cotillions, and openings. Whether formally dressed, or even more aristocratically in casual wear, people at these functions would appear to be mingling among their own kind, with the consciousness of the happy few. A photographer in their midst could only be there, surely, to certify their good manners or high spirits. It’s taken for granted that such an outsider is a paid collaborator with the mood to which everyone nominally contributes. If, however, the stranger turns out to be Larry Fink, the results can be unexpected in the extreme.

This New York artist has a knack for probing under the apparently breezy confidence of such occasions. He dissects them visually so that his pictures reveal the more intimately seductive and ephemerally anxious tremors that can rise up in groups. If they solely treated private, funky episodes within semi-public gatherings, they would not be as gripping as they are. More to the point, Fink’s work transgresses its “proper” boundaries by a convulsive empathy. One is taken aback by the intense, point-blank carnal drama of these society vignettes: the flickering, possessive or dangling hands, the glistening eyes, and the moist hair. At such genteel places as the Colony Club, an unforgettable urgency charges the air. Whenever bold and accepting flesh touch together, or even when there’s the silkiest innuendo of it, Fink seems to have been voyeuristically present, handy with his flash. Where is the hired, decorous photographer who would care to show that kind of appetite, behind as well as before the lens?

Parties do offer spectacular opportunities for the cunningly handled camera. A decade ago, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand exploited the centrifugal diffusions and impingements of crowded good times; they took a liking to that kind of chaos. Like the hip street photographers they are, they entangled the scene with sudden openings of near and far, and a whole slew of marginal, mutually divisible episodes bending with the wide angle. All these promiscuous interactions were choreographed with an agility that does credit to the speed of their eyes and the bold dissonance of their compositional sense. Beyond this, though, they had neither ideas nor anything purposeful to say about the specific behavior that froths at parties. Not for a moment did they relinquish their detachment as observers, even at very close quarters. Though deliriously more resourceful than their commercial brethren, they kept to the same social side and distinguished themselves by a brilliant iciness.

Larry Fink, working with similar subjects much more recently, stands in utter contrast to such attitudes. What were spatial connections or disconnections for the others are also psychic ones for him. In his hands, the flash light is the instrument to gather moral understanding and emotional knowledge. He uses it as a luminous probe that transforms small incident into momentous event. Nevertheless, it veils the action we think we know as much as it serves to highlight it. Above or beneath, to the left or right of a critical business, the light may throw us off the scent. It’s as if the animal reflexes and sly plans of his unwitting models are nurtured by a darkness which he has willfully created himself by blazing away elsewhere.

Aside from the astonishing relief and the off-balanced character it gives to the frame, this light converts a momentary glimpse into what looks like a concisely studied theatrical effect. It impresses us not at all as newsy and nosey, as in Weegee, but as voluptuous and even ecstatic. If Fink has a tendency to caricature, it is also wrestled down by his sensuality. These are the two key ingredients of an unstable mixture that infuses a real excitement into his art. From shot to shot, and often within the same picture, he seems possessed by a lively desire to satirize and to embrace the actors on his stage. Then, too, as I mentioned, one notices his tact.

In the early ’60s, Larry Fink studied with Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model. From the one he could have gotten first-hand intimations of high style, and from the second, a decided taste for the grotesque. Earlier than this, while still a teenager in the late ’50s, (he’s now 38), he had been with his camera among a youth gang in lower Manhattan—“unbelievably angry street poets,” as he called them—blowing up cars and taking rough junk. Attracted to their beat mystique, he neither felt like one of them nor “anything else.” He had been raised in a middle-class Jewish family of extreme left-wing convictions. His own personal rebellion and ideological dissent boiled up furiously during the next several years, alienating him from most of the academic, commercial, and corporate channels beckoning those in his field. Fink regarded himself—because he had given himself no other choice—as a photographer working with people rather than as someone linked by career to a professional community.

In the mid-’60s, he worked for Har-You-Act. When it came under increasingly direct federal sponsorship, the agency and the photographer grew quite suspicious of each other and parted ways. Fink then tried to go slick and self-destructive, hiring himself out to Warhol and Harper’s Bazaar. “In the final analysis,” he reported, “they said come back later when your work isn’t so human.” Meanwhile, he had gotten to know Diane Arbus, another one-time Model student, and he was aware of Weegee’s pictures, whose shots of Harlem and Sammy’s bar on the Bowery impressed him particularly. All this was very volatile experience.

There tends to be something—for want of a better word—“romantic” in the make-up of the estranged, politically conscious American photographer, a Danny Lyon, a Gene Smith, a Bruce Davidson. Fink has a whiff of this sensibility as well. Yet, in place of their pity and sadness, which was spurred by the influence of Robert Frank, he expresses his much touchier social ambivalence. He could not heroize poetic outcasts and underdogs. Nor was he out merely to scourge the privileged and monied classes. Much more unprotected in his knockabout youth than Arbus, he felt the powerful allure of the rich, his class enemies. In time, his theme would become the pathos of desire, envy, and ambition. During the ’70s, he discovered a style in which to perfect it.

I first came into contact with his art in a 1972 show at the Diana Gallery, where he posted photos of his family, neighbors, and bar mitzvah celebrations. At the end of protest journalism, he’d felt over-extended, far from his inner vision. These tight and hot, homey images were perhaps the first in which he had given himself license to be an artist. And it’s significant that whatever his locales since then, ranging from Parsons School art student bashes to beery doings at American Legion halls in rural Pennsylvania, he betrays an almost sibling intimacy with the groups he photographs. It must have been necessary for this trespasser to blend in, with tuxedo or T-shirt as the occasions demanded. Still, one feels that he established a greater rapport with all of them than what mere camouflage allowed. This photography moves with the tide that swelled around it. Merrymakers are not simply objects of his ironic or snide curiosity. Rather, they are fellow human creatures, with their needs hanging out, like his own.

Before saying why I feel that way, let me discuss the view of parties brought out in these photographs. Fink doesn’t seem to care what these affairs looked like or even where they were. He takes no inventory of the guests. If there happened to be some main event, he doesn’t show it. All these bits of information exist, when they do, only as peripheral fill-up. The theme of which he gives the variations may be high-energy drinking or dancing, but even those are shattered into incandescent fragments. There may have been rock music blasting about or raucous clatter. He provides us dark zones emergent with lighted bodies hearing their own, inner beat.

The party takes shape, then, in a rather ominous space inhabited by introspective beings. The peculiar gravity of that introspection affects even the most fugitive expressions or movements. Weighty matters appear to be pondered in mid-stroke and communication seems to be effectuated only across voids, and with difficulty. Yet the actual gestures are relaxed, entertained, or bemused. We recognize the conviviality of the gathering at the same time that we’re baffled by the slowness, or rather the weird suspendedness of its banter. No one poses or gets ruffled—the photographer enjoys an easy passage through the proceedings—and yet the scene, from frame to frame, appears as the most transparent charade of sociability. One senses insecure instinct, or the presence of uncertain or equivocal feeling as it comes through and wins out over assured manner. A party can be visually defined as an array of individual egos in chance conjunction, sometimes pocketed with clandestine anxiety. The tableaux as we know or can imagine them, in their dull charm, do not conform to such a reading. Yet for the moment, all contrary evidence has rhetorically vanished. It is the complete triumph of rampant style over situation.

Nevertheless, Fink’s photos, while they slur fairly obvious appearances, also recognize and isolate some concealed social truths. The larger the party, for instance, the more the exchanges within it are likely to be derailed and unconsummated. People are visibly forced to change psychological gears. Moments of hectic confusion and chinks of unrelatedness open up all around. Fink studies the poignant intervals hemmed in by the fading and blooming of smiles. We can talk about the rhetoric of these pictures, but we can also see how it’s responsible for the split-second insights breathed into his subject… and our experience.

As the folks at Regine’s and Studio 54 kick up their heels, the photographer makes us aware, too, of what’s been called the “me first” narcissicism of the ’70s. He maneuvers with his historical consciousness, which is just as important as his photographic timing. And he’s not bashful in showing his personal animus. The cheery grimaces, stifled yawns, and decadent emptiness which he shows doubtless existed subliminally when he happened upon them. But he inscribes them with such hyperbolic ease that they seem to us astonishing fictions. Contrarily, his manic tempo also serves the exposure of grace, a quality he couldn’t have dreamed up either, though how it could have been as emphatically visible in the flesh as he shows it in his work, one doesn’t know.

It’s not enough, of course, to speak of this art as having pungent graphic contrasts, fluently arranged. His flash casts the privileged set into the most luridly sinister depths, where the fruitiest scandals are hatched. At the same time, the light caressingly beautifies all sorts of bodily features ejected from that darkness. Here, the photographer’s chiaroscuro works judgmentally as much as it does formally.

Fink is fascinated by a gentility whose languor he fashions into arabesques of startling iconic strength. He catches, for instance, the obeisant face of a woman in the custody of male conversation and places her under the drooping neck of a deceased swan or goose in a Baroque painting on the wall behind. Actually, the very form of these photographs recalls Baroque luminism, Caravaggio’s especially. Certainly Fink, in his own way, is as vehement, tendentious, and profane. Oddly enough, these qualities of temperament and style do not sensationalize his theme. Rather, they work to normalize the flawed humanity of his subjects, and to make them, in the end, less remarkable and more like ourselves.

This imagery has to be located, too, in its more immediate tradition, that of Weegee and Arbus, whose artistic potentialities he mingles into a dazzling new amalgam. Instead of the comic hysteria of Weegee’s losers, or the self-implicating hardness with which Arbus lighted her defective subjects, Fink impulsively wants to close the psychic distance between himself and those “others.” It’s as if the more he becomes aware of his outside status, the more he aims to shed it and to wallow in the action. He carries on, incredibly, as one who has special, uncomfortable knowledge of, and long ties of affection with, those in the milieus he photographs. His visceral identification with his figures is strong, yet Fink maintains a crucial detachment, one of consciousness and intent. For while they play he is at work.

— Max Kozloff, Art in America

Fashion is typically viewed, particularly by those outside of it, as some sort of mystifying demimonde, whose basic putative frivolousness marks it as girly and passive. Fashion is thought to be embodied by a particular dress or model or designer or “look” or season or trend, but it is rarely, in anyone’s appraisal, considered a system. There is a “world” of fashion, of course, but what exactly is that world?

Is it an atelier populated by madcap designers and their harried assistants? Is it a magazine office filled with superthin editorial adepts? Is it a modeling agency where chain-smoking agents sit at pod-like desks while pimping their human products? Or is it a Hong Kong sweatshop, a factor’s front room, a cutter’s table, a mediator’s office in Chapter 11 proceedings, the vapor of the zeitgeist, the whirl of chi-chi cocktails, the particular clinic where the beautiful strung-out 16 year olds are sent for a quickie rehab? It is all of these things: a densely layered cultural ecology that reaches a kind of convergence in only one place. That place is a runway.

Violence is not a word most people are in any hurry to associate with fashion. But the business is essentially, almost offhandedly, brutal in its various parts. There is, to cite the most obvious example, the economic brutality central to means of production, as when child laborers—and adults, mainly women—often, but not exclusively, in Third World countries, are put to work at subhuman wages making “designer” sneakers. There is also the testosterone-sodden thuggish ness of the photographic mob that covers fashion shows, waiting in a blind of phallic lenses, grunting at the runway models to reveal more dress, more attitude, more thigh, etcetera.

There is the frenzied pack behavior of buyers and press who attend fashion shows with elbows sharpened and egos preened, grappling first to gain entrance, then to demonstrate hierarchical rank according to seating, and finally to make certain that their ostentatious indifference to most everything around them is well observed. There is then the disheartening general distaste for fashion models, those hapless cynosures who are plucked and prodded with no more delicacy than farm animals might be, and who are worshiped intensely, albeit briefly, and abruptly tossed once they have reached their expiration dates. There is, to amplify this point, the inherent cold-bloodedness of any business founded on an expectation of obsolescence: a sequence experienced in fashion first as the impassioned and often slightly fevered consumption of trends or ideas or people or whatever, usually followed by a repudiation of the selfsame trends or ideas or people or whatever—a kind of ritual cycle of binge and purge.

And there is the basic violence of looking. Few facts about a fashion show are more striking than this: people stare. They stare at garments. They stare at assistants checking credentials. They stare at the runway, for the twenty minutes it takes most fashion shows to run their course. They stare at celebrities. They stare at each other. Jean Baudrillard once referred to the “non-aggression pact we all subscribe to: the prohibition against looking at others.” He did this in a book of photographs he had taken surreptitiously, or “stolen,” on the Paris Metro. People in fashion recognize no such pact or non-aggression treaty. That is why Larry Fink is the proper person to record their world.

Over the six years that Fink spent making the photographs that appear in this book, he distinguished himself by a refusal to honor any tacit prohibition against looking, even when in the employ of fashion magazines. You might imagine that opting not to deflect one’s attention, and one’s intelligence, would be common enough among professional photographers. It is not. A surprising truth about picture-taking is how infrequently the person behind the camera could be considered even to possess an active intelligence. The fact is, much of the time the apparatus might just as well be operating on its own.

It isn’t, obviously. Yet, since a picture is always, in every case, the artifact of a decision, most photographs record not so much an event or moment as they do a cluster of previously held assumptions. One of the most basic of these, in fashion at least, is the assumption of what constitutes beauty. A bracing component of Fink’s pictures is how handily they upend beauty’s ideologies. The people in this book may be, in certain cases, exquisite. But this is not an album of the beautiful. Neither, for that matter, is it necessarily a collection of grotesques. It is rather a social document assembled with an almost scientific coolness, a social-anthropological record in which we observe Isaac Mizrahi mugging, Calvin Klein dropping the mask of cool to register astonishment, Joan Rivers hawking her TV jewelry, and a wistful Mr. Pearl, the English corsetiere with a self-inflicted twenty-inch waist. We see socialites and editorial nuns and demicelebrities and dressers and models and journalists, all taking their part in what you’d have to call a theater of artifice.

If Fink’s subjects are at home with the offhand brutality, the ritualized aggression inherent in their little drama, having made their peace with hypercultivated violence and a willingness to perform, as someone once said, as “economic objects rather than human beings,” then Fink makes us aware that he has considered their dilemma. It might be argued that Fink is not merely comfortable around these states of being; he is infatuated with how they find expression. In his pictures, whether of society folks or boxers or fashion people, the eye is drawn consistently to the moment at which the subject lets slip the mask of civility. Fink’s fashion people appear messy. They look, somehow, incomplete. They seem sorrowful. They look enraged. They demonstrate pathos. They show their teeth. If they appear to be revealing something most essential about themselves when the enterprise they are involved with is most baldly artificial, it is probably because of Fink’s skill at undressing his subjects psychically and then settling down with them in their dishabille.

— Guy Trebay

LESSONS IN DEMOCRACY AND DEMAGOGUERY (From The Forbidden Pictures)

It was time—the election was stolen, robbed by middlemen on top. Folks who thought the past was the future because they owned the present. Entitlement didn’t come from being lazy; it came from cunning, aggrandizing connivance.

The leader was a twice entitled frat boy, a thick-headed intellectual goon, with charisma informed by homily and stubborn gotcha comfort.

It was simple! I was shooting fashion, perhaps a compromise for me, but a trivial, jovial, stylish, learning theater. Why not use its public accessibility for subversion, satire, association, and education?

An idea! One of my favorite periods in twentieth-century art was Weimar Germany, with Beckmann, Dix, and Grosz all melting down convention in an impassioned visionary way. Grosz was especially political, but all of them were hyper-aware of the decadence, the despair, the hysteria, and the lies.

I suggested to The New York Times Magazine (whose rear end is sometimes gifted with fashion spreads) an idea to replicate the period but loosen it, update it, and tell it anew. There were fashion equivalents and certainly moral and historical ones.

Oh the glee! They said yes. I suggested that rather than the corpulent Weimar German types, why not use our current fraudulent leaders, George W. and his cabinet. Oh the glee! They said yes. Political satire and critical acuity are something rarely if ever done in fashion. Yet another coup.

We searched for the cast of dancers, whores, merrymakers, and priests. We searched for the look-alikes of our own Mr. G. W. and his consortium. We found it all and went to work. Five paintings chosen from the period and three days shooting them, interpreting them, and creating aesthetic clarity and political bedlam.

The pictures were shot on 7/19/01 and were hypothetically scheduled to run in The Times in the fall.

9/11 gave birth to doom. The tragic inevitable moment, the rupture of providence, the rape of the external soul of America. And its aftermath.

Critical images of the president and his men would not be published. In fact, all critical thought was temporarily suspended and the fundamentalist Islamic conspiracy bore the turf for the fundamentalist neoconservative conspiracy that was already in wait for the history that would give it license and muscle. Its muscle is still prominent and will be for some time.

As it became apparent that the presidential team was acting beyond the righteous knee jerk of antiterrorism, when the public critical spirit was on the rise, I offered the pictures again to The Times. No! The New Yorker. No! Harper’s Magazine. No! The European market I felt sure would publish them. But no. Like their influences, the images were banned, not by decree, but through a suppression enabled by tragedy and coincidence.

Here in the halls of political science of Lehigh University, they speak their eye and tongue. They are free. But the ever-evolving question is, are we?

— Larry Fink

artist statement from the Lehigh University exhibition of "The Forbidden Pictures"

CONSERVATIVES FRET ABOUT ART AND OTHER WRONG THINGS (From The Forbidden Pictures)

For generations, Lehigh University has turned out the engineers and business leaders who form the backbone of American capitalism. Conservative Lehigh is not the Berkeley of the east. Recently, however, Lehigh has encouraged political heterodoxy. Two very different men, one a diplomat, the other a leftist photographer, have stirred up a ruckus. Regarding the photos, the DuBois Gallery at Lehigh exhibited a collection by noted photographer Larry Fink. The images are redolent of the cabaret society prevalent in Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Fink was inspired by the New Objectivity painters Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. They created fascinatingly conflicted, grotesque images of Germans trapped in the disillusionment that followed their country’s World War I defeat. Berlin was awash in decadence and cynicism, hedonism and permissiveness, as the Nazis tightened their grip. Hitler’s puritanical fascists and the bacchanalian cabaret revelers seemed to be codependents. The Nazis denounced Germany’s decadence while simultaneously using it to justify repression.

Meanwhile, cabaret society served as a refreshing respite from the mindless thugs. In a philosophical sense, the tensions of Weimar Germany reflected the yin and the yang evident today and exposed in venues like Rupert Murdoch’s FOX television network.

First, Murdoch offers us his “fair and balanced” FOX News Network, a 24/7 stream of vitriolic right-wing propaganda masked as objec­tive journalism. Then, our sensibilities are assaulted by Murdoch’s entertainment division. It features a ribald, mind-numbing assortment of “reality” programs, puerile sitcoms replete with raunchy jokes, trash talk, bikini-clad women, and bad acting. Murdoch, the “conservative” media mogul who created such works of art as “Cracking Up” and “Playing it Straight,” also treats us to the likes of a Sean Hannity, an unhinged, sophomoric right-wing scold who can bluster for hours about how liberalism and Janet Jackson’s exposed breast portend the demise of Western civilization.

Larry Fink, perhaps sensing parallels between America today and Weimar Germany, invites us to examine the implications of George W. Bush’s stewardship. All the outraged Bush supporters can relax; Fink’s depiction of Bush caressing a cabaret dancer’s breast is only a metaphor. Bush does not cheat on his wife. Unlike Bill Clinton, Bush is a good husband, but this is not the issue. Fink accuses Bush of trans­gressions far greater than Clinton’s adultery. Obviously referring to the war in Iraq, Fink says that in the aftermath of 9/11, “all critical thought was temporarily suspended.”

Criticisms of Lehigh as being too liberal are laughable. Republicans control all three branches of the federal government and a majority of state legislatures, yet they whine constantly that liberals dominate college campuses. Forgive me for not being terrified. Fink is to be com­mended for impugning a war in Iraq that was launched under false pretenses.

Attempting to explain the mess our nation is in at the moment, Fink laments Bush’s ascension to high office: “... the election was stolen, robbed by middlemen on top. Folks who thought the past was the future because they owned the present….The leader was a twice entitled frat boy….with charisma informed by homily and stubborn gotcha comfort.” He accuses Bush of “acting beyond the righteous knee jerk of antiterrorism,” claiming that the president and his cabinet are “fraudulent leaders.” My interpretation is that Fink’s depiction of a smiling Bush placing his hand where it should not be symbolizes leadership that has taken us to countries where we should not be. To close the circle, Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, spoke at Lehigh on March 16. Blix underscored that the Iraq war was predicated upon false pretenses. He reaffirmed that the Bush administration refused to listen to his caveats about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Not surprisingly, the administration’s inspector, David Kay, reached the same dead end that Blix had reached. Yet, none of this deterred an administration determined to start a war with Iraq.

Larry Fink’s photographs do not offend me. War offends me. Lehigh University has shown great courage in showcasing the Fink exhibi­tion, particularly during these repressive “Dixie Chick” times when political dissent is stomped on, crushed, shut down, and ridiculed. Fink is a patriot who cares about his country. I applaud Lehigh for bringing his seminal work to our attention.

— Donald P. Russo,The Morning Call

CHARGED IMAGES (From The Forbidden Pictures)

Where are the academics questioning the use of this metaphor to attack the president?

The exhibit has provoked an outcry that, not surprisingly, Lehigh people dismiss as puritanical, agenda-mongering zealots. Or worse. “Insane” was the term university curator Ricardo Viera picked to characterize the protest from Grassfire.org, a conservative advocacy group whose members have been flooding Lehigh’s switchboard with phone calls....

The artist himself, Larry Fink, who took the photograph to Lehigh after failing to get his exhibit shown in the pages of The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere, now describes his handiwork as “a satire of political leaders” that is (somehow) meant to represent the injustices of U.S. policy toward Iraq. Seems to me Fink left out a word before “political.” That word is “conservative.”

Lehigh and its academic apologists would have us dismiss the whole affair as a tempest in a teapot that has nothing to do with any wider sociopolitical concerns. They say the controversy is best left to art aficionados, who will sort things out based on aesthetics, not pol­itics. I beg to differ.

The Lehigh exhibit has a lot to do with the sizeable contingent of Muhlenberg [College] faculty who recently drafted a resolution con­demning the Patriot Act and also questioning its constitutionality. Now, my colleagues’ political point is well taken: They’re not the only ones to raise doubts about the Patriot Act. But their political point is not the point here. The real point is: Where was the opposition to this reso­lution from inside the academy? Where is the faculty chorus rising up to argue that the Patriot Act didn’t go far enough? Similarly, where are the professors who, instead of defending (or privately chortling at) the Lehigh exhibit, should be saying, “Okay, I’m all for art and free expression, but what are we trying to say here? And why are we using this metaphor to attack this president?”…

— Steve Salerno,The Morning Call

Photographic series, a powerful springboard for political debate, should not be censored by relocation.

At first glance, one might recognize glimpses of Degas’ “The Glass of Absinthe,” Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” or, as Fink suggests, the works of Grosz, Beckmann, and Dix. These images reveal themselves as a present day indictment of George W. Bush and his admin­istration. They suggest a government wallowing in the indulgences of power and privilege, isolated and protected in personal dens of pleasure. Fink produced a powerful political critique of an administration that he unmistakably perceives to be dangerously out of control. These are images clear and direct in their message....

Almost immediately, there was condemnation of the artwork. There were personal attacks on virtually anyone and everything connected with the exhibition and, although cloaked in “good intentions,” a clear effort toward censorship.

Within days, the process escalated to a national level, with attacks on the quality of the photography, the integrity of the artist, the educational value of Lehigh University, the courage of Lehigh University’s president, the motives of its political science department, the objectivity of one of its journalism professors, the competence of its gallery director, and the legitimacy of the Democratic Party. Sadly, there was little discussion about Fink’s ideas.

Art, by its nature, often provokes these responses....The issues [it probes] and the ideas [it promotes] are not always pleasant....Alternative points of view can suggest devaluation or irrelevance, so it is not uncommon to offend or threaten some portion of society. Although disappointing, retaliation and the fear of the voices of art have always been a part of our history.

What concerns me more deeply was the rapid jump to censorship as the solution. It is easy to identify and reject censorship in the form of burned books, padlocked museums, or simply the removal of art deemed “offensive.” It becomes more difficult to recognize censorship when it is cloaked in a disguise of “compromise” or “good intentions.”

— Nelson R. Maniscalco,The Morning Call

Larry Fink is an intuitively verbal person who can playoff aphorisms like a jazz musician plays off flatted fifths. When the standard vocabulary fails, Fink spontaneously coins neologisms, words like ‘intrinsicity’ and ‘instantaneality’. His improvisational statements and phrases are exuberant and sometimes argumentative, but always decisive and sincere. This might serve also as a good description of Fink’s pictures. Never once have I explored formalism for its own sake, he says, which he quickly explains as meaning that the emotional content—the human content—always drives the making of his pictures. That Fink also has the astonishing ability of a cardsharp to make the chance ingredients of the space-time moment come out just so in the two-dimensional world of the photographic print is necessarily visually compelling. But the formal qualities—the fantastic repetitions of shape and gesture, the slicing vectors of shadow and light that direct the eye to the small, pungent detail—are ultimately conscripted in service of the human element. Moreover, Fink will tell you that the virtuosity of his compositions has little to do with foresight, technical manipulation or practically any method of control on his part. Certainly forty years of experience in photography has made him a master of his tools, so much so that the technical operations are now so natural as to be invisible. But Fink insists that if he really relied fully on his knowledge and experience, the pictures would be failures—they would be too slick. Instead, he honours intuition, improvisation and chance. There is no knowing, he explains, except in knowing that he should ‘just relax and make some pictures’. It’s all about instantaneous discovery. You test your luck and cultivate the givens, much like everything else in life.

A large share of lucky improbabilities marked Fink’s path into photography as an intellectually curious, disaffected teenager on Long Island. Born in 1941, and raised by his middle-class, Jewish, leftist parents to relish social vitality, political struggle and creative expression in many forms, Fink was indifferent to the promises of the get-ahead, post-war culture of the 1950s. When it began looking like he would either drop out or be kicked out of public school, his parents wisely transferred him to an arts high school. By the time he graduated, it was clear that the usual sequence of life events plotted for young, white, middle-class males of the day was not in his future.

Fink and a neighbourhood friend started fooling around with photography when Fink was about thirteen, building an enlarger from a cardboard box and making some pictures. His parents gladly encouraged the expressive sensibilities of their quasidelinquent son. His father, an insurance man, had clients who were artists, including the aging social realists Moses and Raphael Soyer, who had become family friends. The Finks regarded art as an honourable profession, particularly when it was in the service of a social vision. Fink remembers his mother’s enthusiastic reaction to his earliest pictures of ‘some daffodils or whatnot.’ From that time on, Sylvia Fink supported her son’s photography with the full force of her considerable energy.

But how were radicalized young men, circa 1958, to transform their half-formed aspirations into functional creeds and paying jobs? College, a staging area for this or that career, seemed only to defer real experience, so Fink dropped out after a few months and joined a group of ’poets, thieves, goofers—junkies all’ living in subterranean splendour in a basement apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. There he cultivated a kind of Bohemian pictorialism in his photography, making romantic pictures of the indolent, hand-to-mouth lifestyle of his crowd—young men and women sleeping in cots and on dirty blankets on floors, lounging on broken furniture, smoking, playing guitar. From there, Fink and some cohorts took leave of the city and headed to Mexico to work on a movie being shot by some French acquaintances. The movie never got made, Fink got arrested crossing back into the US and ended up on parole for five years. But he was getting experience.

Fink credits a wise parole officer with diverting him from a squandered life, and a generous priest for getting him his first paid job in photography: hence his respect for grass-roots social involvement and activism. In the early 1960s in New York, working first for the Lexington School for the Deaf, then for an agency that supplied photographs to the Catholic press, Fink operated in a journalistic mode, making earnest pictures about worthy human subjects. Although Fink had begun to develop a good visual and technical command of the tools of black-and-white photography, he felt himself more passionately involved with the message than the medium. He now puts this down to the influence of his mother, who never liked aesthetic selfindulgence. Neither did Fink particularly care to meet other photographers at this time, owing to a youthful insecurity that operated in disguise as youthful pride.

Of course, Fink knew the work of the great photographers of the picture-magazine era, who were then reaching new audiences through the post-war boom in publishing. His dad bought him Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment (1952) and The Europeans (1955), and he admired the politically engaged work of W. Eugene Smith, the tormented leftist photographer whose personal aims so often conflicted with the corporate aims of his editors. And like any serious photographer coming of age in the early 1960s, Fink could not escape the weighty presence of Robert Frank. He bought his own copy of The Americans (US edition, 1959), which he hated and loved because of its ‘ungenerous’ attitude. Frank’s approach to his subject was complicated. Fink ultimately came to recognize its admirable personal honesty, although in his eyes it was virtually without joy, which seemed incomprehensible to him.

Yet while Fink was cultivating an image of himself as an independent, who was inspired more by contact with the subject than by any notion of photographic tradition or style, he could hardly avoid testing the hypotheses formulated by the previous generation. Some of Fink’s pictures show him following up the suggestions of his elders about what is worth photographing in the world. For instance, his image of a fiercely self-absorbed man striding down Wall Street in the New York night (no. 24) would look at home among Frank’s resonant images of American alienation. The improbably absurd humour of a group of carefree little girls walking beneath the graffiti slogan ‘WORK IS FREEDOM’, photographed through the bars of an iron fence (no. 07), has the wickedly ironic edge of Cartier-Bresson at his most acerbic. Smith’s legacy might be in there too, perhaps in Fink’s lush tonal sensibility as a black-and-white photographer, as well as in the homage Fink has so often paid to the working people of the world.

Around 1960, Sylvia Fink received a tip from a commercial photographer who had recently fired her admittedly talented son: if Larry really wanted to develop a uniquely expressive view, he ought to study with Lisette Model, a respected and famously uncompromising figure in the small world of New York art-photography. Model, an Austrian Jew who had fled Europe in 1938, was so committed to her own photographic interests that she barely stayed afloat with freelance assignments. To make ends meet, she taught at the New School for Social Research and, with her husband who was a painter, received a circle of private students and artists in her home. True to character, Fink never took part in these group critiques, which included other photographers who are now well known, such as Leon Levinstein and Diane Arbus. Instead, Model came out to see Fink at his mother’s house on Long Island. Although this pedagogical arrangement lasted for little more than a year, the experience was a formative one.

Model’s instruction mainly consisted of philosophical conversations with Fink about the pictures he was making: dialogues that flowed into discussions of what it meant to be human. Fink didn’t know Model’s own work at all, and she never showed it to him. They shared similar political views (she was part of the New York Photo League when McCarthyism forced the League to close in 1951), but neither photographer was interested in the expressly narrative documentation of social realities that is sometimes described as ‘concerned photography.’ Nor were they so interested in the literal. In fact, whether through the influence of his mentor or by way of natural affinities, Fink’s photography has some of the surrealist flavour of European photography of the 1930s, particularly the work of Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and, perhaps most of all, that great explorer of the poetic, unreal demi-monde, Brassaï. Like these photographers, Fink came to appreciate public life as an uncanny theatre of chance. Acutely attentive to the visual disjunctures and surprises hidden in the folds of the living moment, he understands the camera’s transformation of animate life into picture: shadows take the shape of birds, human gestures synchronize inscrutably with architecture, unacknowledged desires reveal themselves through arrested glances. Absurdity, pathos, grace and wit operate by turns, sometimes passing in an unbroken circuit through a single image.

Yet for all his appreciation of the metaphysics of intuition, the purely physical holds pride of place in Fink’s view of human experience. With his respect for the primitive authority of the body, it is hardly surprising that Fink’s pictures celebrate our drives to fulfil sensual demands: to compete for food, drink, sex and bodily pleasures of all kinds. Sometimes they show us offering our bodies as objects to be visually consumed, engaging in spectacles of physicality like catwalk modelling, boxing or performing sex for movie cameras. Other times they locate our secret moments of corporeal alienation. A crowd in Fink’s pictures is less a group of people than a writhing press of bodies, stretching, gesturing, completing and compounding each other, like refugees from Mannerist painting.

With his heightened sense of the drama of human flesh, Fink has something in common with both Model and her student Arbus, who was even more captivated than Model by the corporeality of others. However, Fink’s theatre is not as driven by individual characters, but rather by the actions that animate them and connect them to each other. Under Model’s tutelage, Fink learned to trust and appreciate photography as an active principle, as a means by which to negotiate the terms of living in a human body that naturally interacts with other bodies. It’s not a matter of the photographer effacing himself so that the object can emerge from the picture in some pure ‘essential’ form, but of him reacting to his fellow beings with an honest range of feelings: joy, disgust, contempt, wonder, curiosity and attraction. This is a modality Fink now refers to as ‘sensual empathy’ and, if we want to apply the terms of art, it’s what tips the balance of his work away from realism in the direction of expressionism. Unlike many photographers of the social realm, such as the circumspect Cartier-Bresson and Frank, who take up positions as virtually invisible observers when working, Fink is an interactive participant who categorically enters the scene as a photographer with cameras and flash in hand. In this sense, Fink takes after another beloved predecessor and fellow New Yorker, the freelance tabloid photographer (and Lisette Model’s pseudo-rival) Weegee.

By the mid-1960s, Fink’s freelance career was well under way. Photographing ‘incessantly, obsessively’ brought him to a point of clarity about what he was doing. Seeking to serve social change and effect political awakening through the visual means in his power - this was an honourable mission. Glad to throw in his lot as a photographer of the revolution, Fink photographed the demonstrations, began teaching photography to inner-city children in community programmes, and curated photography shows at Columbia University for the peace movement. These activities caught the interest of Magnum, the gold standard of picture agencies. Perhaps it was Magnum’s formidable, exclusive status as a collective run by the world’s most famous photojournalists, but Fink was not ready to acquiesce to success. He preferred to carryon as before, following an intermittent trail of opportunities suited to his notion of acting for the social good. For the moment, making a contribution was better than making a living.

In 1969, external pressure and his own striving ego ultimately led Fink to take his first ambivalent step into the art world proper, when he accepted a show at an emerging gallery in SoHo. Over the next few years he received increasingly prominent shows in the US and abroad, including a one-man exhibition in 1979 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An exhibition at MoMA seemed somewhat paradoxical, as Fink still speaks with some warmth about the rumour that in the 1960s the Museum hired CIA-trained curators and conspired with the government to keep the work of politically engaged artists off the walls. While Fink welcomed the recognition, he was troubled by his participation in a system so deeply enmeshed in the structures of money and power. Stranger still was the fact that the work attracting this notice consisted of subversive pictures that skewered Manhattan’s cultural elite and exposed the dubious veneer of morality that protects the very rich. These pictures would form the basis of Fink’s first book, Social Graces (1984), a dialectical portrait of high and low culture in the US.

The project proposed itself years earlier when the contrarian Fink, determined to provoke social critique, sought a way to expose the corrupt nature of power that is so well concealed by the benevolent, magisterial stance of cultural leaders. He bought a tuxedo and played the part of a society photographer, insinuating himself into the Olympian world of New York’s Museum Mile charity balls, debutante cotillions and art-gallery openings. Having previously used available light in the interest of a noninvasive working style, he now faced the technical problem of photographing low-light parties full of people dressed in black. In 1968, when he was hired to cover a centennial ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he brought along a hand-held flash for the first time. It was, he recalls, an exhilarating revelation of power. By 1972, the black-tie project was absorbing Fink’s full energy and focus. Now he began using the hand-held flash almost exclusively, just as he retired the 35 mm camera in favour of the square format twin-reflex.

Having settled on his technical tools, Fink infiltrated these events like the undercover radical he was, filled with a delicious sense of ‘wrathful sedition’. In the tradition of artists like Francisco de Goya, George Grosz and Otto Dix (all personal heroes), he ran this gauntlet of parties in order to bear witness to the baser instincts of our social betters. Lust, vanity, mendacity, avarice, gluttony—his subjects displayed them all, just like the bloated patricians of ancient Rome. But if Fink really stands by his philosophy of ‘sensual empathy’, we’re correct in sensing a complicating factor in these pictures of captains of industry, their leathery wives and concupiscent offspring, in that the photographer could recognize many of his own frailties and appetites in theirs. Fink’s immersion in the unfolding scene thus suggests not so much a clinically detached observer as an experienced participant—one who is therefore qualified to testify. A few of the black-tie pictures exhibit an unexpected tenderness, pictures taken at a demure distance that return a respectful acknowledgement of the loneliness and psychic pain that afflicts human nature, even for those of vast privilege. Fink was not the only photographer working at these kinds of parties at the time (occasionally he would run into Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand, who also recognized alcohol-fuelled gatherings of the ‘beautiful people’ as events loaded with ambiguity and interesting visual potential), but he was undoubtedly the most direct about his adversarial reasons for doing so.

After several years, a change in Fink’s living situation presented him with the means to draw this portrait of American wealth even more sharply. In 1974, well into the black-tie project, Fink and his wife, the painter Joan Snyder, bought an ancient, dilapidated farm in the backwoods of eastern Pennsylvania. The postal address was Martins Creek, a remote village that serves the area with a church, gas station, corner store and post office. What he found there was a community of hard-working farmers who owned nothing but their vehicles and a parcel of land (if that), and who lost a bit of their capital and their health every year. These descendants of Jacksonian democracy bore witness to the fact that the egalitarian dreams of the founding fathers were hopelessly at odds with the methods and needs of an aggressively capitalist society. In other words, Fink found a community that answered his romantic yearnings for authenticity and confirmed his bleakest political beliefs about contemporary America. Still, Fink was cautious about thinking of his neighbours as a possible photographic subject. While he knew the two groups of pictures would draw each other into a natural dialectic, this was not the reason he began to take photographs of the people at Martins Creek.

Over several years he came to know his neighbours as friends, particularly the Sabatine family, who invited Fink and his young daughter Molly to their casual gatherings and ritual celebrations: birthdays, graduations, Fourth of July cookouts, anniversaries and so on. By the time he was ready to photograph them, and they were willing to be photographed, he had developed an organic understanding of their collective life and, above all, valued his relationships with them as individuals. Fink acknowledges the photographer is in an impossible situation when representing his fellow human beings: he cannot help but have a personal will and intention that can never be fully transparent to the person he is photographing. More to the point, the picture will go on to have a life of its own that neither the photographer or the subject can predict or control. Fink accepts this as the burden he must bear in exchange for the chance to be the translator of something meaningful and personally ‘real’, but ultimately elusive and ephemeral. So the process of photography requires an act of faith on the part of all involved: photographer, subject and viewer. Fink’s subjects are usually knowing and complicit, like his neighbours in Martins Creek. But even when this is not the case, as in many of the black-tie photographs, Fink insists his search is an honest one. ‘There’s something in me that is so oddly natural about photographing,’ he says. ‘As soon as I put a camera in front of my eye, there’s something in me that remains innocent… even if I’m fully aware of its result, my search is innocent.’

As in the black-tie pictures, Fink was attracted to the spectacle of sensual indulgence at Martins Creek, but here it is at the level of kitchen-table buffets with their huge sheet cakes, cans of soda, punch bowls and heaps of popcorn, or Legion Hall bars loaded down with bar glasses, pitchers of draught beer and overflowing ashtrays. Unlike the resolutely adult culture of the black-tie parties, the rural social circle includes babies, pensioners and everyone in between, but this does not necessarily reduce the Martins Creek parties to a sweet and wholesome version of the black-tie events. In fact, part of the appeal of the Social Graces project lies in Fink’s consistent portrayal of sensuality as a double-edged faculty. Like their black-tie counterparts, the Martins Creek people cultivate the human appetite to both the delight and the detriment of the body, but they are less likely to cheat time with the luxury of cosmetic surgery or health-club workouts than they are to receive sub-standard health care. The ambivalent future of the healthy young bodies of Martins Creek children is manifest when compared with the forms of their physically haggard elders. Life can be short and brutish; pleasures need to be taken where they’re found, usually in the shelter of the family.

Following the critical acclaim for Social Graces (1984), Fink found himself struggling against his own success and newly golden reputation, resenting the expectations it heaped upon him, but nevertheless fearing to lose that status. At about the same time, his marriage to Snyder was coming to an end, all of which contributed to his decision to spend some time in Europe. This liberating break from US culture brought him back to the ‘core need’ that made him take photographs in the first place: his compelling questions about our experience as wonderful, flawed human creatures. When he returned, he immersed himself in freelance work (which he has never abandoned), investing assignments with the same importance and values that guide his personal work. With his abiding sense of proletarian worth, Fink takes pride in being a working photographer, as opposed to a rarefied artist who ‘soars only in his own stratosphere’. ‘A lot can be said for exploring your own potential,’ he observes, ‘but there is also some contradiction to the notion of that exclusively being freedom.’ Fink looks for answers to his questions about human sensuality and desire in many places: at a convention of the religious right, in corporate conference rooms, or backstage at a Versace couture show. Some of Fink’s greatest pictures come from taking photographs at weddings and bar mitzvahs, and from assignments for any number of magazines.

In some cases, small magazine assignments have led to Fink’s richest subjects, like the boxing series he began on assignment for Manhattan, Inc. That first experience of taking photographs at a small gym in Catskill, New York, in 1987 recalled some long forgotten, purely visceral and wondrous excitement that Fink had felt as a child listening to boxing matches on the radio, but which had been lost for him in the transition of the sport to television. He spent the next ten years taking photographs in the small boxing gyms and rings around Philadelphia, culminating in a book published in 1997. Similarly, Fink’s trenchant photography of the fashion world—generously commissioned over the past decade by the very culture he critiques—has been collected in Runway (2000). A book tends to crystallize a subject for him, leaving little need to go further once he sees the pictures in their distilled, edited form. Nevertheless, Fink admits he still does parties: ‘While I can say I would never photograph another party again, once I get to a party and start my camera moving, with all the people drinking and goggling and goofing and doing stupid or wonderful things, I get interested in photographing again.’

Fink still lives in Martins Creek and he still keeps up with the neighbours. His daughter is now grown up and he has remarried. He maintains the same intense pace of freelancing. In addition to his packed schedule of professional work, he has been teaching photography since 1965 at institutions such as Yale University, the Cooper Union School of Art and, most recently, Bard College. He finds in his students an analogue for his own passions and curiosity about the world, which adds further continuity to his life.

Over the years, Fink has found flesh, and the spirit that animates it, at the heart of most of his work, whether in pictures of waiters, pugilists, underwear models, high-school students, Portuguese fishermen, wedding guests, stockbrokers or elderly women. His profession still absolutely thrills him, and it is his own ebullient, scathing, curious or chastened response to each situation that gives these pictures life. But to forget the viewer would be to betray Fink’s principles, for his first theorem is equal access: he will never neglect to put the viewer on the guest list. ‘I’m not interested in an oblique art,’ he explains, ‘though I am interested in oblique terms that may better express very literal ones.’ Although he has tempered his expectations for profound, positive political change in his lifetime, he still feels photography is the best way he can serve his old humanistic ideals. Nothing is more basic than the human desire for knowledge and experience, whether carnal, spiritual or something else, and in pursuing the way we negotiate those drives with our fellow beings, Fink will continue looking for larger relevance in the small gestures of individual lives.

— Laurie Dahlberg

I entered behind the beat, two days late and wailing, born into a family of social radicals and pleasure seekers. The folks swung and danced through three or four major decades of the music. Throw in some lead belly and lightning and the ears of a hungry innocent were fed with profuse profundity.

Jazz players were my heroes. I idolized and was awed by them. As a young boyish man, I stood in line at the clubs unknown to most so that I could experience first hand the inner pleasures of beauty, the linear intelligence, the liquidity, and the release.

The first of the heroes who became real and simply human, was Mr. Five by Five, Jimmy Rushing. Prompted by a high school project I ventured into New York and found him at Colombia studios. I interviewed him as to his life, photographed him, and left. Four years passed before I would see him again. I was shy and frightened, a combination which conspires with relational discontinuity. He was singing at the half note on Hudson Street and in between sets I approached him. He looked up. “Hey little man where have you been? Why haven’t I seen you sooner.” Mr. Five by Five was as big as love is and listening to his voice is an experience that lightens the heart, deepens the soul, and projects positive emotional avidity in the best of all ways.

It becomes clear that I could write a multitude of short stories about the music and the musicians. Short stories, in a life long with story, but I won’t. This book is an offering of my absolute moments in a whirlwind of subjective layering and relativity. The music, all music, from low-brow (whatever that is) to high-brow (whatever that is), is created by humans from the surrounding energy and the heavens above. It is the way of momentary transcendence and it is an intelligence that supersedes literal thought and rational cognition replacing it with lyric intuition and rhythmic cadenzas pulsing from the heart.

The book is not meant to be thorough, it is not comprehensive, it is peppered with favoritism, all of the historical insufficiencies are not of design but expediency. The images reflect where I have traveled, what I have seen and heard. Hey are visits and revisits with people whom I developed relationships with, some simply because of the music and me through personal attraction and receptive affinity.

Music, foul and growling, dark, round and tranquil, long and clear. It is for me the river of life. It feeds me on the deepest level. I wish to share with all, the majesty of being witness to sound.

— Larry Fink

Essay by George E. Panichas (From Somewhere There’s Music)

Photographers make records. Although they occasionally use equipment of mystifying sophistication and employ techniques and strategies of great ingenuity, their immediate goal is always the same: to capture and then reproduce in images a world of persons and places, events and things. Recording, however, is not speaking. As aspiring photographers quickly learn and lovers of great photography have always known, when photographers have something to say—especially something of both aesthetic and social importance—their photographs must be more than accurate likenesses permanently registered in some medium or other. The ultimate goal of accomplished photographers, therefore, is to transform the images they record into meaningful expression: they must make pictures that speak.

The transformation of recorded images into socially and aesthetically meaningful expression is a process that results in what contemporary aestheticians call an artifact. In their special use of this term, one that is true to its etymology, a photograph can be thought of as a certain kind of thing—a recorded image—that is made into another kind of thing—an art object. Now this transformative process does not require, though it can surely exploit, cutting-edge technology of great complexity. A simple silver gelatin print can speak more eloquently than a complex and cleverly manipulated computer-generated collage. But as with any medium in the arts, the trick of successful photography is the production of artifacts, whether simple or complex, with or through which photographers can speak importantly and effectively to their audiences. Here, success requires great understanding of both the history and conventions governing visual communication in various media, both photographic and otherwise. But furthermore, and in the special case of that genre of photography whose import is both aesthetic and social, successful communication requires cultural and political acuity. The great photographers in this genre, exemplified by persons such André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, Robert Frank, Sabasiãio Salgado, and of course, Larry Fink, produce artifacts of value—make pictures that speak—because they have both a particular understanding of, and special insights regarding, the social, political, and economic circumstances of their time.

But assuredly this is only the beginning. For the remarkable accomplishment of these great photographers is that when they succeed in speaking importantly on matters of social consequence, they do so in a distinctive voice—one identifiable as theirs alone—a voice that advances the social critiques of which their work is an indispensable component. In this way, and as seems appropriate given the subject matter of the photographs included in this volume, the work of this genre of photographers bears a striking resemblance to the work of the great jazz musicians who are their contemporaries. So just a the musical voices of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk are distinctive, readily identifiable, and work to advance musical understanding, so too do the pictorial voices of the best photographers of Larry Fink’s generation work to advance social understanding. And it is this understanding that socially informed and aesthetically sensitive audiences are happily educated to recognize and enduringly able to appreciate.

The photographs included in this volume stand as aesthetically complex and socially insightful records of musicians (famous and not) and those for whom music—especially jazz—is often life-defining. In one critical respect, however, this collection differs from and is of greater moment than those of Fink’s earlier collections of published photographs, especially books such as: Social Graces (New York: Aperture Books, 1984, reprinted, New York: powerHouse Books: 2001), Boxing (New York: powerHouse Books: 1997), and most recently, Runway (New York: powerHouse Books: 2000). For while the pictures in those important volumes focus attention on quite specific topics, each set was taken over relatively brief periods of time—periods after which Fink’s distinctive voice had matured and been employed to great effect. None of these volumes includes a chronology of work that spans the entirety of his now half-century career as a working photographer. The present volume is unique, then, because only here does one finds a photographic treatment of the single topic that has received Larry Fink’s continuous attention throughout his life as a photographer. Only here can one witness the development and refinement of his distinctive photographic voice from its earliest beginnings to its full maturity.

The first image reproduced in this collection, that of Jimmy Rushing, was taken when Fink was merely 16 years old. By his early 20S, he had photographed Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Lightning Hopkins, Roswell Rudd, Kenny Dorham, and Steve Lacy. Setting aside for the moment the striking aesthetic qualities of these early pictures, it is worth emphasizing just how unlikely these photographs are, and what this unlikeliness reveals about Fink’s background, especially about his personal interests and political sensibilities. After all, in the milieu of its origins and throughout its complex development in the 1950S, jazz was largely the creation of black Americans. The venues in which this music was played and appreciated reflected this fact, and while some whites (in addition to hipsters and the beats) came to be appreciate post big-band jazz and regarded bebop and hard bop as music of extraordinary genius, few whites in segregated America were sufficiently comfortable with blacks or black culture to enter into their communities, camera in hand, ready to make visual records. How did it come to be, then, that a white adolescent would embark on such a remarkable adventure?

An explanation can be found in the circumstances of Larry Fink’s family life. His parents, rare in their generation, had black friends and associates, knew and entertained blacks socially, and listened to recordings of jazz in their Long Island home. So not only was Larry Fink raised in an environment where hospitality was extended to blacks and thus where he was comfortable in their presence, but he grew-up listening to the music that would eventually be recognized as the great gift of African Americans to world culture. Indeed, Fink was sufficiently moved by and interested in jazz that he learned to play jazz piano, followed the careers of important jazz musicians, and became a devoted club-patron and listener to jazz. So when he visited jazz venues in Harlem and Greenwich Village as a teenager and young adult, he did so in relative comfort, and with a double purpose: to listen to the music he loved and to record images of the artists he admired.

In addition, and more important to a certain reading of the photographs in this collection—a reading that will be presented and explored below—Fink’s parents were well informed and politically sophisticated communists for whom the plight of black Americans was of special interest and deep concern. They and their compatriots understood blacks to be working persons who are, in greater proportion than any other racially or ethnically discernible group, members of the exploited working class. Furthermore, they recognized the real-world implications for blacks of systematic, intergenerational race discrimination. Left-wing activists of this period knew full well that race was employed not only to deny work and opportunity to African Americans, but also to assure that when work was made available to them, it was of the most difficult and demeaning kind. Finally, these activists were fully cognizant of another and perhaps the most insidious use of race—its employment as the chief mechanism whereby black and white workers were pitted against each other in the struggle for economic and social justice. Although the Supreme Court of the United States had rendered state-sanctioned segregation illegal two years before the first of the photos in this collection were taken, the America of Larry Fink’s late adolescence and early adulthood was a profoundly race-conscious and bigoted country. And in the home in which Larry Fink was raised, there was a sophisticated understanding of, and informed outrage regarding, this multifaceted injustice.

So as a young man, Larry Fink came to appreciate the free creative efforts of certain geniuses of 20th century American music.
He came to love the music and to admire the efforts of those who invented it, played it, and were influenced by it. But, nourished by the sophisticated political sensibilities prevalent in his family environment and energized by the liberation movements of the second half of the last century, this affection and admiration should assuredly not be analyzed solely as an aesthetic response to the music and its influence. For, as can be witnessed in the photographs reproduced in this volume, Fink’s response to the musicians whose images he records has a distinctively moral quality; it is one of profound respect. This respect is the appropriate response—it is something owed-to those who, in the face of multiple and persistent burdens, worked knowledgably, creatively, and with integrity. In this sense, then, the photographs included here are both an homage to the creative and diligent musicians they record, and a celebration of their free creative work as a liberating, life-enriching force. These photos, then, speak to its viewers about music as the labor of a life.

Consider, on page 9, the attentiveness of Horace Parlan to his keyboard, on page 17 of Lightning Hopkins to his guitar, and of an anonymous jazz player to his bass on page 39. Study also the relationship of the players to their instruments on pages 46 and 64· Here musicians concentrate on their instruments, but in a way that involves taking something of themselves—psychological focus and aspiration to virtuosity—and bringing it to the instruments of their labor. Now, with these images in mind, view pages 11 and 59, pictures that emphasize the physicality of playing a musical instrument. In these images the shoulders and arms of bass players are made powerful by their placement in the picture’s forefront. But then, on page 12, Fink draws attention to fingers elegantly placed along the chromed flute of another anonymous player. He the viewer that while the physical act of playing—work in this fundamental sense—sometimes requires brute force, at other it demands delicate dexterity. The work of music portrayed in these images is that of a kind of intellectual labor, work that requires attention and concentration informed by understanding. But the images do not deny the sheer effort required by this labor, its physical component. Indeed, through careful use oflight, focus, and calculated composition, they emphasize it in a way that is aesthetically compelling.

Fink frequently records individual players in a way that emphasizes their efforts as individuals. In these photographs—consider pages 8, 25, 39, 46, 47, 48, and 49 as examples—he treats the musicians simply as players, that is, with no attempt to present differently or distinguish the famous from the less well known or either from the anonymous. Unlike certain well known photographs in which famous jazz musicians are photographed from below, wearing elegant clothing while performing in classically smoky venues, or displayed in dramatic close-ups that exude an iconic quality, here the treatment of the musicians is remarkably egalitarian. And, of course, this makes sense. For what the musicians are shown to share is not fame, but a deep commitment to a life’s labor of music. They are people who work and perform hard: notice especially Marion Brown on page 47, Bruce Springsteen on page 70, the vocalist at Trixie’s on page 74, and Dave Liebman on page 122. And they are human beings who, as does Roland Kirk on page 40, play music on the arm of a child, are attended to by friends or lovers, relax on the bumpers of automobiles or with a saxophone at the kitchen table, or read menus in a cafeteria window. The aesthetic appeal of these photographs is thus special, for it is both distinguishable and wholly separate from any allure the subjects may enjoy because of their celebrity. The pictures of musicians included here work as statements about the labor of these individuals—the labor of and in their lives—and not about any fame that might result should their labors enjoy market success.

But modern music, especially jazz, is more than an undertaking of soloists. As surely as this music depends upon the stunningly quick-thinking and technically proficient improviser—the musical genius with great chops—it also requires collaboration and mutual aid. And the collaboration can be, as several of Fink’s photos show, of different kinds. As examples, on page 43, the collaboration appears as one of mutual support, on page 51, of reciprocal expression, and on pages 62 and 84, of intimate communication. Thus in addition to providing portraits of players whose contributions to the musical effort can be personal and idiosyncratic, Fink’s pictures reveal a deep understanding of what makes jazz combos work: musicians must work as colleagues, as women and men cooperatively involved in a venture of mutual satisfaction.

Many of the pictures in this chronology enjoy a romantic, if not romanticized quality. When playing their instruments, some of the musicians and vocalists are captured with ethereal expressions, in trance-like states. They appear wholly disconnected from realworld concerns and worries. Unlike many for whom work can be drudgery, the musical labors of these musicians appears to liberate them from these concerns and worries; music takes them to another, seemingly better place. In addition, and augmenting the romantic quality of many of these photographs, are certain of the visual qualities that coalesce to distinguish Fink’s photographs from those of his contemporaries. All the photographs are black and white, and printed by hand from film negatives. By exploiting off-camera flash and careful printing techniques, the pictures enjoy a remarkable luminosity, a near opalescence that accentuates the subjects or combinations of subjects to which Fink wishes to draw attention. By the time his photographic voice matures to its now recognizable timbre (approximately the mid-1970s), his photographs enjoy a distinctly nostalgic quality. So that "somewhere" where there’s music is a better place, and the people who are there are the better for it.

Larry Fink is plainly enamored of the musicians and their loved ones, and often amused by their associates and fans. And his deep respect for their creative work, whether it is that of a deservedly famous trumpeter such as Roy Hargrove, or a struggling high school tuba player, is evidenced throughout. But it would be a mistake to read these photographs in a way that overemphasizes their admittedly romantic qualities. For these images do not provide or encourage an unreal picture that denies or glosses over the tragic circumstances, both personal and social, that engendered those powerful musical expressions of which jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll are the most conspicuous examples. Although Fink’s photographs present his subjects, particularly musicians, with sensitivity and affection, he does not depict their labor as all play and no work, all satisfaction and no frustration. Nor does he present the joyous moments of musical expression as evidence that simply because their work is of great value to others and themselves, the lives of musicians are idyllic.

On more careful examination, some of the gestures and certain of the faces recorded in these rather extraordinary photographs express vulnerability and fragility. Thus when experienced in their totality—as a complete text—the images of the persons and places recorded here should be regarded as richly textured and nuanced statements about the lives and times of those for whom music is of intrinsic value. Indeed, these are the lives and times of which Larry Fink’s pictures speak with undeniable eloquence.

— George E. Panichas

How many of us would train six hours a day—train not just for strength but for armor, for the twist of the muscle that makes it invulnerable and pliant simultaneously? Train so that on the way to the battle our tools will stand the test, our body will prevail? Such a personal way to inflict injury, so intimate is the contest for egos and skills fighting for primary dominance throughout the history of the world.

Between these sons and brothers and surrogate fathers—Trainer, Manager, and Holy Ghost—a deep fraternity exists. A gym is like a teeming, aggressive town square, a public square with private intentions. Men measure and sharpen their skills in the stale air, rife with the physical strain of rhythmic obsessions: dodging bullets, jabbing mirrors, lean legs dancing. Leather pounds punch by thudding punch; floors squeak, sweat stinks, boys yelp. A girlfriend beckons with cautious flirtation. No mothers here, save for perhaps a trauma of some yet unseen moment. Fathers belong but don’t often stay, and the acrid grime on the opaque windows allows a degenerate sun to shine a ray of light in the basement of desires, where fists are harder than rock and bodies are paved with leather, where gloves beat love and need into practical shape. How else to resolve anything but to contest?

Watch a boxer’s face before he wins anything. It is the face of the socially frightened, the sluggish inhibitions of socially inept cerebral synapsis. Only in competition is there comfort. Only with men does the guard come down and only for one moment, for the next moment is in the ring. After victory, after defeat, nothing ever seems to be content. There is no patience in the primary world. It will not even wait for the present. It holds the future in its hunger.

This book is unlike my other book, Social Graces, which was conceived before the stumbling, tragic failure of socialism. (I, being of the left, was working in what I thought to be a revolutionary context, and without the rigid polemics of that conventional ideology I created for the record a possibly historic work.) This current study of boxing was born out of an assignment to photograph Jimmy Jacobs, Mike Tyson’s manager and heir to Cus D’Amato’s throne as father and trainer of complete men. Jimmy died and Tyson is present, but already there is a deeply troubled history. The excessive opposites active in and latent within the sport drew me in. I found a world so rife with anecdote and pathos, so full of contradictions as to be a world within itself. I sought no political end or will. I came as a sophisticated novitiate and saw the dramas within the fraternity as they unfolded.

Fraternity of the men for me is of the most profound importance. In a world of infinite complexities, anywhere which seems like home is home. The nurturing, as it has never been told before, is perfectly stated by Katherine Dunn:

…A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another. Anyone there will gently wipe any other man’s face with a towel, fix his helmet straps, tie his shoes, massage his tense shoulders. There is no shadow of impropriety, no question of motive.
This tender, respectful nurturing is absolutely necessary because of one magical ingredient of the game: the gloves. Anyone wearing bulky, fingerless gloves is utterly unable to blow his nose or take a drink of water by himself. Those who are not gloved-up help those who are. From this central fact radiates the whole demeanor of the game. (Mother Jones, September-October 1993)

Without that being said there is only bloodshed and brutality. The world is made up of balancing forces. These forces within the world of boxing are so extreme that they serve as a reminder that metaphors are not from literature, but from life.

— Larry Fink

Introduction by Andy Grundberg (From Boxing)

As anyone who has seen When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s exquisite and poignant film about the Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” can attest, there is more to boxing than throwing punches. Boxing has more decisive moments than photography could ever hope to capture, and it has a politics more complex than even Karl Marx could encompass. In the large and incredibly speedy hands of Muhammad Ali, for example, the politics of one man taking on another’s furious assault could speak to the politics of the whole world: of racism, colonialism, and the oppression of the poor and disadvantaged.

Like boxing, photography is a hybrid of art and science, a rough and sometimes dangerous way of getting to know the forces of the world. And in some respects a photographer is like a boxer, firing off the shutter in flurries, using film as if it were energy, hoping to land the big punch, the decisive shot that captures the round and, in the end, lodges forever in the collective memory. One can imagine Larry Fink dancing around the boxers seen on these pages in a high state of alertness, stalking, feinting, measuring them, cutting off the ring and then capturing them with a flash…. But enough: Fink’s pictures are about the subculture of boxing, not photography.

Since I know little about boxing as an art, much less as a science, I am forced to think of Larry Fink’s photographs in terms of their politics. Boxing, as Bert Randolph Sugar details in his essay, has long functioned as the cultural location of underclass assimilation, which is to say as the means by which “we,” the dominant class, recognize and come to terms with “them.” “They” can be immigrant Irish, Jews, Italians, or (as Ali put it) former slaves—the drama that is played out in the fight game is of the displacement of one disadvantaged group by another, and of the individual’s rise from obscurity to fame, wealth, and public prominence through the sublimated exercise of his manliness.

This psychological and political drama, so rich in possibility and transcendence, is a natural subject for Larry Fink. From the beginning of his career as a photographer he has focused his camera on the disparities in our society between rich and poor. His empathy with the rural underclass near his home in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, is obvious in his earliest successful pictures. His curiosity about the behavior and values of the urban elite is equally apparent in his subsequent pictures of New York City parties, dance clubs, and cultural galas. More than any other photographer working today, he is able to cross the cultural divide with his senses intact. His boxing pictures are an extension of this class-determined vision, located not at the glamorous end of the boxing spectrum, where the Don Kings of the world preside, but in the club gyms where Golden Glove hopefuls and never-will-bes mingle in the equalizing salve of sweat, saliva, and blood.

Fink’s obsession with the distinctions of class in American life put him squarely in a social-documentary tradition that has its roots in the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s and the Photo League of the 1940s. But his is no simple ideological vision of oppressors and the oppressed. He cut his teeth at the feet of Lisette Model, a remarkable photographer and teacher known to hold up Diane Arbus as the model for her students and as the sine qua non of the medium’s capacity for honest revelation when freed of cultural prejudice. He found himself drawn to subcultures much as Model and Arbus had been, finding in the cracks and crannies of American life a means to articulate a complex relationship to the larger culture.

Unlike Model and Arbus, Fink does not render the subcultures he uncovers as inherently exotic or perversely glamorous. His flash lighting produces an effect that is reminiscent of Weimar Expressionism, signaling that life is neither pretty nor easy. Sentimentality is not permitted. His lighting is not a strange, tantalizing element of the photograph, as in many of Arbus’ pictures, but an integral part of the scene; it illuminates what normally lies in the shadows, not the center ring. In these pictures, the lighting and the camera collaborate to lay bare the grimy, peeling, stained, tawdry environment in which boxers with dreams of oversized championship belts and fat paydays ply their trade. But the marginality of the boxers’ gyms, dressing rooms, and rings only enhances the nobility of their quest. Fink gives them not just the benefit of the doubt, but also the benefit of his considerable sympathy.

Larry Fink’s photographs of boxing join a large archive of boxing images. They might be filed somewhere between the fight photographs that used to grace the back pages of the tabloids (back when Friday night meant fight night at Madison Square Garden), and the self-conscious documents taken by numerous photographers before him in the name of art. Where art stands in the equation of Fink’s photographs is an interesting question, because it doesn’t stand out. If anything, these pictures have an artless feel that is to all their credit. Let others worry about separating art from journalism, portraiture from documentation, sports from life, Fink seems to be saying. What matters is the message.

Fink’s confidence in the ability of these photographs to speak for themselves, without artifice or self- consciousness, is partly what makes them so admirable. That the pictures can be so full of event, incident, atmosphere, and physical detail—so muscular, one is tempted to say—and still speak clearly about a world removed from the museum wall or printed page is testament to talent that has yet to achieve the recognition it deserves. No mere shadow boxer, Larry Fink is putting a deep dent in photography’s heavy bag.

— Andy Grundberg

When the sky is blue and the moon is wet, when the wind is gray and the earth is empty, I cry. My days are inhabited by absence. Primal elegance has turned to dust, and my eyes burn backwards in my head, my mind becomes lumpen. I have lost my friends. The mantises are dead.

I found them at home, in the fields and on the sills of each window, hanging as predators do, waiting for prey–still life thrusting, going through its cycle. It has been five months on my knees, three hours each day, camera in hand searching for images that allow me entry in a world where I cannot be. I am large, but they in their force are larger than me. I have been awed; I have been frightened. I lay waiting, trying to enter into their ravenous avidity. I photographed from the inside not the outside; I became what I beheld.

These images were taken within the space of two years in the late 1970’s. To say the least, they are off my beaten track. The experience taught me about the microcosm, and the certainty of the universe. I am thankful for the fixation.

— Larry Fink

Incredulous Exasperation (A Small Tale of a Man at Work)

The evening was pitched as an idea to allow photography, the Met, and me, photography’s practitioner, to fly without wings; with spirit born of humanist and aesthetic tradition. This important moment was given to me because of decades of investigation into the high-class world of party-infused rituals.

The Met had hired me, at some expense, to document a party of their young donors. In 1968, a different epoch, there had been a commemorative evening at the Met, for which I was also hired. I had to use off-camera flash for the first time ever. Flash was not my tool of choice in those days. I felt it to be aggressive, off-putting and not worthy of my ambitions.

But, the event was dark and layered description was necessary. Shooting throughout the evening I felt a punishing intensity pulsing within me. Everything was in step and completely out… it was exciting. The cover and the first two pictures of this book were created then. That evening was a precursor. Seven years later I adopted flash as my modus operandi.

Now, decades later, I would come full circle at another spectacle of grandeur. The theater was the Temple of Dendur, a vast hall of historic stone and legend, crated up and shipped to America when a dam threatened to put it underwater. The Metropolitan Museum of Art made the winning bid in 1967. The spirit of Isis watched over this modern sacrament.

The evening was three months in preparation: assistants, consultants, lights, fifteen strobes, spot-beam, plus much heated aesthetic talk about art, photography and their considered meanings. Excitement brewed on the rim of the event like salt on a margarita, drunk with promise. The day could not come fast enough.

The event was interactive. It would be shot with digital equipment, downloaded, edited, and projected onto the walls of Egypt until the evenings end. Before this interactive blast of revelation, the walls would be dappled with older images of mine—those known to be iconic and which had been entered into the canon of the history of photography.

This context set up a construct wherein I competed with myself, new against old, within the liberties and confines of black and white. It was a daunting and imperious task. I was the hopeful master of the bank of chance and its givens.

The crowd, en masse, partied within control; rich beauties and boys, diamonds and lace, breasts and creases, shoe patent tapping, inferred hunger and little release. As the eve went on, strove for honesty and impact. As quickly as images came on the walls, they disappeared, allowing the haute crowd a visual whiff of a pre-ordained, partially subversive gift.

“HEY MISTER, WHERE IS THE REAL PHOTOGRAPHER?” (You know, the one who will accept our pose with subservient grace and give forth to the world a moment which we control.)

Feeling smaller than a moment before, I emitted these words:

“LISTEN,” I said, “I AM POSSIBLY THE MOST FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER YOU HAVE EVER MET!”

They were, of course, an ironic boasting—an attempt to reclaim my throne.

Both parties, the couple whom I addressed and myself, were struck with a lightning bolt of
INCREDULOUS EXASPERATION. This condition, with all of its implicit contradictions, was the unexpected result of our meshed realities. My words were overheard and published. They sprawled across the pages of W Magazine as a report on the party.

So it seems, the laugh is on everyone. Perception is ever a mystery. From the darkened wall comes the light of day for this small book. After all, everything that I do is for me and for thee.

Enjoy,
Larry Fink