Fink: how the working-class throws parties

Pat Sabatine’s Twelfth Birthday Party, May, 1981

Pat Sabatine's Eighth Birthday Party, April 1977

Tying in with Maggie's earlier post of Fink's work with the nightlife of America's VIPs & Hollywood power players, Fink also explored the celebrations of the working class in Pennsylvania. Pat Sabatine’s Twelfth Birthday Party, May, 1981 features neither the celebrating child nor what Fink refers to as the “holy mess” of the Sabatine family kitchen, but simply an anonymous hand and the geometry of a gesture. Such intimacies underscore Fink’s belief that all of his subjects, regardless of social status, share the same underlying of emotions, political ideals, and alliances.





[source: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/fink_larry.php]

"Can This Marraige Be Saved?"

An article published in The New York Times Magazine by Laurie Abraham on August 12, 2007 described a year-long couples therapy session given by psychologist Judith Coché. The photographs that accompanied the article (all taken by Nicholas Nixon) are of the couples it described (and of Coché) and were taken in Coché’s Philadelphia office.

[source: nytimes.com]

Nixon, People With AIDS

In 1986, Nicholas Nixon and his wife, Bebe, began the People With AIDS project in 1986. They intended to show honestly and compassionately what it is like to have AIDS, and how the disease affects family and friends of those afflicted. They wished to demonstrate why AIDS is "the most devastating social and medical issue of our time."



The most famous photographs in this series are those of Thomas Moran (above), though fourteen other individuals suffering from AIDS were also photographed.



When it was first shown in 1988, the series of work was seen as "one of the first and most controversial mainstream art exhibits on AIDS, becoming a kind of standard by which to measure dehumanizing, degrading representations of the disease." Several rights groups vehemently protested the photographs, stating that it only showed the negative side of AIDS, that it only showed death and despair. These groups wanted more diverse and more positive representations of people with the disease.

Today, however, this series is seen as historically important; they are described as a stark contrast to the abundance of images of happy and healthy people with AIDS. Perhaps they're a warning of the pain caused by the disease, or perhaps they were simply a documentation of a few people's lives.

as they died, NIXON

april 25, 2005

feb. 15, 2005

As They Died

Nicholas Nixon, study of illness and dying. He photographed people and thier loved ones as they went through the stages of dying from terminal illness. Some photographs were taken days before the subject passed.

under the surface, FINK

Under The Surface” is a thought-provoking social commentary that demonstrates Fink’s ability to reveal the intimate in the most crowded of settings and the flaw in the most perfect of scenes. The images are iconic black-and-white photographs of American VIPs, Hollywood players, boxers, runway models and blue collar workers. In a photo of George Plimpton blowing smoke rings to the amusement of a young Ivanka Trump and her model friends, and in a surreptitiously captured shot of rising starlets just outside the glow of the red carpet, as in all his images, Fink illuminates the private and unexpected moments we would otherwise rarely see. A master of the “snapshot aesthetic,” Larry Fink is in the esteemed ranks of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.

-taken from http://www.stephencohengallery.com/

Since 1975, Nicholas Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters producing a single photograph each year featuring the sisters in the same order (youngest to oldest from left to right) though at various locations along the East Coast. From left to right we see Heather, Mimi, Bebe (Nixon’s wife), and Laurie as they change and grow from year to year in image after image. The Brown Sisters series functions as an ever-evolving portrait of the siblings and their relationship to one another over time.
Although best known for his ongoing portrait series of his wife and her sisters, Nicholas Nixon addresses many traditional themes of documentary photography – the family, the elderly, the ill – essentially pictures of people of all and any type. Using an 8-by-10-inch camera, Nixon captures the essential textures, tonalities, and expressions of the people he photographs. The father/daughter portrait Yazoo City, Mississippi is from a series Nixon made of people on their front porches.

Link

Fink - Runway

Larry Fink: The Forbidden Pictures

In 2004 Larry Fink's series The Forbidden Pictures was on public view for the first time.

Fink: “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?”

The photographs in this series put look-a-like politicians in satirical situations. Originally the photo spred was going to run in The New York Times Magazine on September 16, 2001, but that was thwarted with the events of 9/11.

The exhibition eventually went on display January 28, 2004 at the Dubois Gallery of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA.


* * *

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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 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 20th 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, merry makers, and priests. We searched for the lookalikes 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 work was to run in the Times on Sunday 9/16/01.

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 which was already in wait for the history which 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 anti-terrorism, 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 by mute fearful compliance to the norm.

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

Nixon - His Family

Bebe and I, 1997

Clementine and I, 1997

Bebe and Clementine, 1986

Sam, Bebe and Clementine, 1989

Clementine, 1986

Sam and Clementine, 1995

Nixon has said...

When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large.

Link

Fink reflects on his work...

Some people mistake my work for satire. I don’t object because satire is a powerful force, so if the work is seen that way it serves one function. But I don’t agree. The pictures are taken in the spirit of finding myself in the other, or finding the other in myself. They are taken in the spirit of empathy. Emotional, physical, sensual empathy. This work is political, but not polemical. There is potential for the formation of an underlying theme in how the system suppresses and distorts both the rich and the poor, but it is not Marx who chooses the characters in this book; it is lust, attraction, and destiny.

Link

Nixon Bio

Nicholas Nixon was born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied American literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received an MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Nixon has worked as an independent photographer since 1974. He is the recipient of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowships, and a Massachusetts Council for the Arts “New Works” Grant. He currently is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Nixon has been exploring portraiture and social photography since the 1970s. Although best known for The Brown Sisters, he has created several other series noted for their humanity and restrained emotion. Nixon often spends a year or two exploring his chosen theme: among his subjects have been nursing home residents (Old People), AIDS patients in their final months (People with Aids), and Boston schoolchildren (School).

His photographs have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has published many books of photographs, including: Nicholas Nixon (2003); A City Seen (2001); The Brown Sisters (1999); School: Photographs from Three Schools (1998); People with AIDS (1991); Family Pictures (1991); Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People (1988); and Photographs from One Year (1983). Nixon’s photographs are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.

From Link

Fink Bio

"Larry Fink's photographs are like the stage in a darkened theater. His hand-held flash splendidly illuminates the details of the drama before us and reveals the nuance of the personal moment," wrote Susan Kismaric, associate curator, Museum of Modern Art. Larry has been photographing for almost fifty-one years and teaching for forty-one. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A major retrospective of his work was on tour in Europe for almost ten years visiting more museums than it is possible to mention. He recently had a show at Camerawork in Berlin and opening this month is a show at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in LA. In 1984, Aperture published a book of his work, Social Graces. A new edition of this classic book was published in 2001 by powerHouse Books, who has also published two other monographs of Larry's work, Boxing and Runway, and a catalog published in 2004, Forbidden Pictures, 07/19/01 which was a political satire prompted by the GW Bush Regime. In 2005, Phaidon Press published Larry Fink by Laurie Dahlberg. A new book was just published by Damiani Editore entitled Somewhere There's Music. It is a compliation of 50 years of images from the book at Villa delle Rose in Bolonga, Italy. There are two Somewhere There's Music shows coming up in Italy. The first is in April 2007 at Galleria Forni in Milan. The second is from June 21 to September 9, 2007 at Museo Alinari in Florence. Another recent book release is a collection of praying mantis entitled Primal Elegance published by Lodima Press. He has taught at Yale University, Cooper Union, and the New School and has conducted numerous workshops in the United States and Europe. Since 1988 he has been a professor of photography at Bard. In addition to his personal photography and his teaching, he has photographed for an international array of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone and has shot ads for Adidas, Nike, Gucci, MasterCard, Cunard, and Chivas."

From his Bard page