Fink and Model

It is worth noting that Larry Fink studied with Lisette Model. Lisette Model, "Woman with Veil," 1949, Right

Forbidden Pictures - More Images

The whole set of images can be seen HERE

Also, Conscientious has a bit on these with links to news reports LINK

Fink on Teaching

"In a commercial culture, imagination is the last element to be nurtured. I try to give students the courage to exercise and enjoy the pleasure of their imagination."

Various Magazine Work by Larry Fink

Nicholas Nixon - Lovers

Nicholas Nixon, M.P., M.J., Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, 2000

Nicholas Nixon, M.C., P.G., Brookline, 2000

Nicholas Nixon, K.S., J.Z., Somerville, Massachusetts, 2000

Disturbing Similarity

Larry Fink Paris, France January 1996

Nicholas Nixon, Tom Moran January 1988

I have to say- there is a disturbing similarity between Fink's runway photos and Nixon's photographs of AIDS patients.

Nicholas Nixon, Tom Moran October 1987

Larry Fink Christian LaCroix Haute Couture, Paris, France, January 1996

Surely I'm not the only one who sees this.

Links: Nixon 1, Nixon 2, Fink 1, Fink 2

Depictions of the Elderly

Larry FinkNice, France July 1988

I came across this photo of Fink's, and was struck by the turn that it takes (at least in my mind) of his depiction of ordinary people. I posted earlier about his photos of families not being as intimate, as soft as Nixon's, but this photo changes my mind somewhat.

Nixon's most famous photos of the elderly depict patients in nursing homes, all seemingly in their last few days of life. There is a certain amount of truth to this, in confronting the issue of death in this way (he has certainly dealt with the issue in several projects over the years), but the photos are a little harsh, lacking in compassion perhaps. Fink's photo shows more hope, more life than Nixon's depictions of the elderly generally do.

Nicholas Nixon C.C., Boston, 1983

Links: Fink, Nixon

Comparing Family Photos

Nicholas Nixon, Bebe and Sam (1995)

I was looking through Nixon's photos of his family, and Fink's photos of the Sabatine family at the birthday parties, and noticed something. While Fink's photos are certainly more candid than Nixon's, they seem far less intimate. He seems to have photographed as an outsider, peeking in at another family's celebration (which very well may be what he did). Nixon's photos of his family (in general) seem very posed, but yet they retain a sense of intimacy that Fink's photos of the birthday parties lack. Even in Fink's photo of himself with his daughter(?) Molly, the effect is harsh, quite unlike the softness of Nixon's photos.

Larry Fink, Self with Molly (1982)

Nicholas Nixon, Clem with Bebe (1996)

Links: Nixon, Fink 1, Fink 2

Thoughts on Larry Fink:

"I love working with him. I can count on a picture that goes beyond the obvious, a picture that is both stylistically strong and in content reflects the story for which it has been taken."
- Elisabeth Biondi, picture editor at New York Magazine

"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"
- Susan Kismaric, associate curator, Museum of Modern Art.

From the start of his career, Larry Fink has exhibited a sharp eye for sociological detail and a consistent aim: to explore human beings as wonderful, flawed creatures. Whether prowling weddings, bar mitzvahs, high-society galas or the boxing ring, his favorite subject is the social animal. Through photography, Fink connects with his subjects on an emotional level, using flash to extract moments of startling honesty... Fink’s work is also marked by a sympathetic portrayal of social conditions and a relationship between photographer and subject that is affectionate and empathetic, yet unflinching.




[source: http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/maylectures2005_06.html]

The Human Condition

One thing that strikes me about both Larry Fink and Nick Nixon is the way they handle their subject matter (the human condition) with a gentle, human touch.  Whether it is Nixon's AIDs patients or Fink's boxers, the idea that these are individual, feeling, living, breathing people is always very apparent.  The sadness, the joy, the growth, everything thing about being human is in their work.

School

In the mid to late nineties, both Larry Fink and Nicholas Nixon published photos of grade school classrooms/students.

Larry Fink Cleveland School of the Arts 1998

Larry Fink Cleveland High School of the Arts 1995

Nicholas Nixon, from School 1998

Nicholas Nixon, from School 1998

Nixon spent nearly a year photographing at various schools, including Perkins School for the Blind and the Tobin School, among several others. This collection of photos was published in the book School in 1998 (coauthored by Robert Coles), and has become some of Nixon's most famous work.

Fink's photos were taken over the course of several years, and are often overlooked in favor of his more theatrical works.

Fink Boxing Review

Larry Fink

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART / BOXING, POWERHOUSE BOOKS, NEW YORK, USA
In the course of a long career as a self-categorised leftist social documentarian, Larry Fink has insinuated himself among rich white people at their social gatherings, and amongst poor white trash at theirs. The tension between the objective and voyeuristic aspects of this kind of work is not uninteresting, but problems of finding an appropriate viewing distance may arise. Boxing, the subject matter of his latest exhibition, is especially open to this criticism. Not only is it rife with racial complications, but its intensity is a lure for people who wouldn’t normally have anything to do with it (Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind).

Perhaps Fink is wary of this, for only one of his 23 black and white photographs of boxers, mostly club fighters, taken between 1989 and 1995, shows a fight in progress. Boxing, Blue Horizon, Philadelphia, PA, 1990 (1990) depicted two fighters taken from a steep angle, high up in the crowd at the legendary Philly venue. But the real focus is on a spectator in the foreground, with his back to the camera, who has jumped from his seat with his arms raised. There are equally few fight scenes in the more extensive book version of the project. Instead, Fink has chosen to concentrate on the immediate, grimy, sweat-soaked periphery of the ring: the gym and the locker room.

Many of the images are about men preparing to fight. There are a number of photographs of locker-room scenes in which the boxer is curiously alienated from his surrounding trainers, seconds and various hangers-on. A photograph from the Blue Horizon in 1991 is particularly tense: a black boxer lies on a training table in a white robe, his hands wrapped and folded on his chest. But he goes almost unnoticed at first glance, beneath the oblique gaze of a white man in a suit, at whose shoulder stands a white fighter in street clothes. In another image, from Champs Gym, 1993, a small, intense, white boxer is warming up with his back to a dingy wall. His eyes are downcast and his wrapped hands reveal the swollen knuckles of his little fingers, his slight frame dwarfed by the back, shoulder and stubbly profile of his trainer. In another image from Champs, a black boxer crouches in a dark training ring, but the image is dominated by the trainer’s arm extending out of the shadows, his hand on the boxer’s head.

In the foreword to the book, Fink quotes approvingly from the writer Katherine Dunn, suggesting that the boxing gym is a space for intimacy between men, unsullied by questions of motive, etc. But little of this intimacy is revealed by the photographs.

What does emerge is all too familiar. Boxers are typically working-class men from minority populations, some of whom develop extraordinary physical skills and mental discipline. But in the course of doing so they are, also typically, exploited and patronised. That Fink understands this is clear from the evidence of an image so dark that the gym can barely be made out: a young, edgy-looking black man is being spoken to by a much larger bearded white man in a suit. But does anyone really need to be told, yet again, that boxing is a crucible of both masculinity and hope, or that it is an avenue of escape (however qualified) from the ghetto?

It is certainly true that very specific forms of intimacy develop in the gym. It is also true that they develop within a certain framework, motivated by the prospect of making some money. Even the trainer wants to make money off the boxer he loves (listen for him saying ‘we’ before a fight, and ‘he’ after his man loses). The successful boxer must not only beat his opponent, but come to terms with the corruption of the business he’s in. Fink comes closest to capturing this in one of his simplest images, a portrait of a black fighter in a locker room at the Blue Horizon. Robed, with hands wrapped, gloves beside him, he has the ageless face of a veteran in a sport that shortens lifespans, and is utterly alone and self-absorbed, throwing miniature punches as he visualises what he knows is to come.

The problem with Fink’s vision of boxing is that it is ultimately too peripheral. He seems not to have come to terms with the other side of the relationships between men in the gym. That is, the intimacy that develops between opponents in the ring, when everything else becomes secondary. Fink doesn’t demonstrate much grasp of the respect, the tacit agreements, the spite, the wide range of understandings that develop within fights. So he can’t always persuade us that he really sees what he’s looking at, outside the ring. He risks only giving us more of the stylised seediness that is stereotypical in representations of boxing.

Frazer Ward
Link

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]

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/

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

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

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