“How do you photograph professional musicians at work and in love? If you're Larry Fink, you hang out with Orpheus, the chamber orchestra of players who really love their work, partly because they don't have a conductor to make them miserable.

Then you make like a fly on the wall instead of a fly in the ointment. You concentrate less on players playing than preparing to play. You shoot cellists so deep in conversation, they seem married to their instruments. A French hornist who practices alone, oblivious to a pile of bad-weather boots. A violist who sits backstage near a shadowy pool of light, as if he's waiting in the office of a film-noir detective.

A sense of enchanted labor colors “The Sense of Sound,” an exhibit of Fink's black-and-white pictures of Orpheus in Lafayette College’s Williams Center for the Arts. Lafayette commissioned the series to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the center, a sanctuary for orchestra and photographer. Orpheus is in its 22nd season as a resident ensemble at the Williams, where it warms up for Carnegie Hall performances of challenging new works with adventurous soloists. Fink comes here to hear killer classical and jazz musicians he hears on recordings at his farm-zoo in nearby Martins Creek.

Orpheus and Fink have other bonds. Fink is a socialist who levels the playing field by taking shifty, mysterious photos of club boxers and runway models, stockbrokers and power brokers — in 2004 he stirred a national hornet's nest with a satirical portrait of a lecherous George W. Bush lookalike. Orpheus is a democratic collective that mixes it up, too. This season at Lafayette the ensemble premiered a Ravi Shankar concerto with his daughter Anoushka, a sitarist and world musician, and continued a cycle of six works that living composers created as companions to Bach's Brandenburg concertos.

Bach, it turns out, is Fink's top god. “He’s totally mathematical and sensual and all about redemption,” says the photographer. “‘The Art of Fugue’ is one of my all-time favorite energizers. Any of his oratorios or masses will put you in sorrowful heaven for a week.”

A Fink-Orpheus alliance made perfect sense to the orchestra's general manager, Zev Greenfield, a photographer and a Fink fan. He introduced the musicians to Fink through a visual score: “Somewhere There's Music,” a 2006 book of Fink's images of musicians over half a century. Page after page sings with lovingly lived-in, subtly spiritual portraits of singer Jimmy Rushing, saxophonist John Coltrane and other jazz heroes.

“You know there's somebody there who's truly touched by what he's hearing and seeing,” says Greenfield. “It doesn't matter the topic, the moment or the image, Larry gets to the heart of the matter and the soul. What I told the musicians is that a great soloist is coming into their midst.”

Photographers, of course, can never really be true partners with a classical ensemble. They’re naturally invasive with their clicking shutters, their flashes, their constant angling for better angles. Distractions are particularly distracting to the Orpheus players, who depend on eye contact to conduct themselves, inside and outside their sections.

So, before he began shooting Orpheus at work, Fink received a ground rule real soloists rarely receive. He translates this invisible waiver thusly: “Don’t get in the way of the guys when they’re trying to look at each other.”

Fink added his own ground rule while attending 15 Orpheus rehearsals and a handful of performances in Easton and Manhattan. Trying to be sensitive and creative, he focused less on working than the elements of work. He pictured violinists conferring with the intensity of national-security advisers. A bassoonist reading a crossword puzzle that resembles an illuminated paper airplane. Skid marks created by the endpin of an overactive cello.

As usual, Fink tried to make musical compositions. Enveloped by music, he didn't have to try as hard. It was more natural, somehow, crossing bows like swords, halving a picture with a piano lid, creating a suite of tones with a bassoonist who wears a Mozart T-shirt.

According to Fink, “The Sense of Sound” is a quixotic quest to express “what it’s like to be enraptured by music. It’s absolutely impossible, but wonderful to try for. You're looking for beauty and dignity and grace and balance. The music is behind you, with this tremendous emotional fuel. You're swimming through these musicians, who are so invested in humanity, in decency, in exuberance. The sum part of the evidence is that they really enjoy themselves more than other orchestras because they really take control. It's amazing to see how hard they work and how fulfilled they are at the end of the day. God, how they have good times!”

Fink thoroughly enjoyed himself, too. “You're nice to have around,” said Frank Morelli, bassoonist, crossword puzzler and Mozart T-shirt wearer. “You look like you're in love all the time.”

This black-and-white love affair turned Technicolor during a conversation last week at Lafayette between Fink and Christof Huebner, an Orpheus violist and the ensemble's program coordinator. Huebner jokingly remembered Fink as a “dark shadow” who popped up from nowhere and seemed to dance to music. Fink said he danced more to Mozart's lyrical notes than Elliott Carter's crazy noises.

“Larry really did blend into the scenery,” said Huebner. “We just took him in. It wasn't like this foreign body; it was: ‘Oh, Larry, he’s here — of course.’ And before you knew it, the photo was done and he was gone.”

Huebner recalled only one conflict with Fink — a quick one at that. At one point the violist told the photographer to stop blocking his view of the concertmaster. “But I'm taking photos!” replied Fink, more helpful than hostile.

According to Huebner and Greenfield, Fink endeared himself outside sessions as well. An unusually social photographer, he talks to his subjects at length and in depth. He especially liked talking to the Orpheus members because, to him, music is nothing less than life with melody. When he said that music was created to ease the fear of silence, he sounded like Orpheus, the mythic musician whose lyre rerouted rivers, rocked rocks and charmed the devil out of the devils in Hades.

Fink's wife, artist Martha Posner, testified to his animal nature. The Orpheus images reminded her of his late ’70s shots of, of all things, praying mantises. In both cases he stalked, waited patiently and attacked painlessly. In both cases he was a frog with a flash.

— Geoff Gehman, The Morning Call

“Fink’s work transgresses its ‘proper’ boundaries by a convulsive empathy.”

“Under the equivocal guise of party photographer, Larry Fink uses his camera as voyeur and moral investigator. His flash discovers the undercurrents of sensuality and anxiety beneath apparently convivial surfaces, creating high drama from private emotions in semi-public place.”

“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

“Larry Fink’s pictures currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art- black-tie parties in New York, lower-middle-class gatherings in Martin’s Creek, Bangor, and Pen Argyle, Pennsylvania, near Fink’s home- are among the most beautifully crated contemporary photographers to be shown in New York in the last year (Steichen Gallery, 3rd floor; through October 30). Fink knows his conventions well. He is expert at the abrupt eccentric farming that often characterizes the unwieldy square-format cameras he uses. He has mastered the descriptive possibilities of strong on-the-camera electronic flash, and uses them for extraordinary verisimilitude: On a white tablecloth in a shadowy corner of a fancy hotel ballroom, empty glasses, a carafe of water, and a bottle of vodka have their own unique degrees of transparency. Taffeta, velvet, starched cotton, cheap polyester, the heavy twill of work clothes, beaded chokers, and garish, over-long false fingernails proclaim themselves and the social class of the men and women who wear them. With perfect timing, he simultaneously spots and captures fleeting, precise expressions of discontent, ennui, or hilarity. Fink’s enviable skill gives his work the authority and impact of direct, sudden observation.”

— Ben Lifson,Village Voice