November 28, 2023
Larry Fink (1941–2023) has left us.
He was a first-class photographer of people, especially people seen in crowded rooms at night, trying for human connection amid multiple colliding agendas, blaring noise, strong drink, and photographers’ flashes going off in their faces.
Readers of this magazine will remember his images of America’s impoverished or his coverage of presidential campaigns, but even more his annual attendance at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, which he photographed from 2000 to 2009; the highlights were compiled in his 2011 book The Vanities. The pictures show a society of professional performers that is at once a real social world and a facsimile of one for media purposes. The performers are fully human, even if they inevitably come with some version of their CV appended to their image. Larry shows them parading, lurching, conspiring, needling, withstanding, sweet-talking, confiding, and trying to remember the name of the person they’re talking to.
His pictures aren’t exactly fly-on-the-wall. He is quite consciously and three-dimensionally there, taking up space. He is functionally invisible, since it’s a party, with people throwing elbows left and right, and even his flash goes unnoticed, because he’s hardly the only photographer in the room. Unlike his colleagues, though, Larry isn’t there for celebrity. What he looks for are photographs, and the instant that makes a photograph can feature waiters or security just as readily as the movie stars everyone wants to know. In every picture something is happening that is interrupted by something else: shadows, or errant limbs or heads, or unwitting photobombing from the rear, or just the intruding edge of the frame—that is the rhythm. The melody is taken up by one or more human beings confronting the world, or withdrawing in the midst of it.
Larry was born to left-wing Jewish parents who had made an early jump to the Long Island suburbs, and was raised with a sense of social justice and responsibility and respect for the arts. He dropped out of college after a few weeks and hung out downtown with second-wave beatniks in a cloud of drugs (see his book The Beats). All the while he was taking pictures, though, and after he was busted at a Mexican border crossing (with “a belt of marijuana for New York,” as in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl), others lent a hand. He would credit a kindly parole officer–and, in other tellings, a priest–with finding him opportunities to take pictures for charitable organizations.
As Larry told photo historian Laurie Dahlberg for a 2005 Phaidon book on his work, his parents arranged for private lessons with Lisette Model, the legendary expatriate photographer who moved her field of study from the Promenade des Anglais in Nice to the Bowery, and who taught a generation of New York photographers, including Diane Arbus. Model never discussed her work with him, nor did she ever show it to him. That may seem hard to believe, but such is the telepathy of a good teacher—in a way, she didn’t need to.
Unlike slightly older contemporaries such as Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, Larry was a politically engaged photographer. He never overtly editorialized in his pictures, except by his choice of subject; his powerful pictures of Malcolm X are standouts. He also photographed jazz musicians at work, in clubs or rehearsals, for most of his life, ever since the blues shouter Jimmy Rushing (“Mister Five by Five”) befriended him early on in his career. At the start of the 1970s, Larry decided on a new direction. Inspired by the brutal Weimar-era paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix, who depicted bomb-shaped plutocrats guzzling champagne while the world burned, he bought a tux and became a society photographer in the literal sense of the term, covering debutante cotillions and Metropolitan Museum balls and English-Speaking Union balls.
He had found his métier. On the circuit he did preserve individual portraits of power, contempt, and alienation. But he was also able to find innocence, desire, the joy of performance, and even occasionally the euphoria of release, as in his often-reproduced Studio 54 photo of the dancer with the floating braid and torsioned neck. He also photographed the plus-ones, the military escorts, the hangers-on, the wait staff, all the accessories to the figures in the center of the room, because to him they occupied just as much psychic and physical space.
At around the same time, he bought a farm in rural Pennsylvania, and began to photograph the social rituals of his neighbors, poor subsistence farmers whose land might have been passed down through many generations, but whose work was hard and pleasures few. There he found the same kinds of patterns and cockeyed symmetries as in his New York society shots, and there’s a similar ratio of joy to melancholy, so the two sets extend rather than undermine each other. There’s just too much common humanity between them, for all the obvious disparities. Yes, the rich are different; they have more money.
I met Larry when I began teaching at Bard in 1999; he had been there for 11 years then. I knew his work a bit, and had wondered about the Pennsylvania pictures especially. What was his relation to his subjects? Was he an intimate or just a voyeur? When I met him I knew immediately: He was fully engaged with the world, and never merely an eye. You can see in his rural photos how he is right there at the bar, on his stool, among his neighbors; his flash seems to trouble no one, because it is an aspect of Larry.
He adjusted the emotional temperature in any room. He was loose as a goose, humming with energy, bouncing on his feet, now and then pulling out his mouth harp and delivering a blast of Little Walter bent notes. He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated he had no need to prove it. It further enhances any of his pictures to imagine Larry in the act of taking them.
All of us who knew Larry will now be left with his images. But we will also imagine, in our mind’s eye, his lifelong magic act.
