Nixon Summed Up

(his best known photo series) "series which show us again and again why his work with the slow, contemplative large format camera surprises and enthralls viewers. It is because the results are more than portraiture; large format has never been used in quite the way Nixon uses it. Technically, his photos are always thrillingly composed and lovingly detailed. Emotionally, his photos inhabit a world somewhere between the action click and the thoughtful composition, capturing fleeting but meaningful moments. His subjects' expressions combine a buoyant hopefulness with an ominous cognizance of human frailty. These qualities are what give his photographs their poignancy."

-New York Institute of Photography, Photographer's Spotlight

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."

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.

"I know that I often fail – in the grand hope that a good one (photograph) might evoke everybody’s home – but I want to try anyway. It’s a way of making moments of whim, of feeling, have more shape than words could ever give them."

"I always look hard at whatever is in front of me. If I like what I see, I have to make a photograph of it. I just can’t help myself. That, and because I love them so, are why there are so many pictures of my home and my family."

Nixon talking about his Lodima Press Portfolio Book "Home" from 5B4. Link

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