I found an interesting essay on NIXON being a contemporary "photodocumentary" photographer.

LINK: http://webhome.idirect.com/~gordwest/minweb/gwtexts/nixon/nixonweb.htm

CONTRAST

I thought there was an interesting contrast between this image taken by FINK:

& the images of the dying taken by NIXON:

One woman in the lavish luxury of life and the other lying on her death bed.

interesting thoughts by NIXON:
as taken from "Family Pictures"

Why do you use and 8x10 view camera?
I use it to get a contact print; it's no more complicated than that.
Sensuality seems to be prevelant in your work. What's that about?
It's just my pleasure---just me. It has to do with the way I love the contact print,
and what I love about people: their bodies, and gestures, their separateness, and
their eyes.
Also, there is alot of contact between people--touching and caressing--just physical stuff going on.
Partly thats what happened when I was there. But these are the moments I choose
to like. It's just my taste. It's what I love, and what I believe in intelectually, and
what I love to look at. It seems inexhaustible, and connected to other aspects of
culture and history that matter to me.
Aging is a major theme in your work. Is that something you've always been interested in?
Instinctively, yes. But it's not something that I'm methodically trying to prove or to
chronicle. It's simply part of my energy to be interested in things that are
ephemeral---the feeling that everybody's mortal.

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/