Larry Fink

Larry Fink took up photography as a hobby in the mid-1950s. Through his adolescent years, he used the camera as a license to venture beyond the confines of his suburban Long Island neighborhood. One of his earliest series consists of tranquil photographs of the Manhattan studio of artist and family friend Moses Soyer. During the 1960s, Fink photographed extensively throughout New York City, both on assignment for magazines and for personal projects. His subjects ranged from children preparing for their First Communion ceremonies to artist Andy Warhol and his entourage hanging out downtown. Fink also photographed his many travels, including a 1958 road trip to Mexico with a group of beatniks, and subsequent trips abroad to the Dominican Republic, England, and Italy.

Larry Fink

In the mid-1970s, Fink began making photographs at black-tie events for the wealthy and powerful. His dramatically-lit photographs depict a gamut of human emotion, ranging from the lustful gaze of a drunken partygoer to the suspicious, icy stare of an aging ex-debutante. When Fink displayed the photographs in a solo show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1979, he paired them with others he had made at parties and gatherings of his working-class neighbors in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, the rural community to which he had moved earlier in the decade. The exhibition’s curator, Susan Kismaric, later observed that despite their divergent subject matter, the photographs “record the tension between one’s keenly felt public identity and the inner exigencies of the emotional psyche.” The series was published by Aperture under the title "Social Graces" in 1984, quickly becoming a cult classic among photobook collectors.

Larry Fink

Music was one of Fink’s lifelong passions and a recurring subject of his photography. His portrait of blues and jazz legend Jimmy Rushing, created in 1957 for a high-school assignment, marked an early milestone for the young photographer. “Jazz players were my heroes,” Fink remembered in his 2006 book, Somewhere There’s Music. “I idolized and was awed by them.” As a young man in the 1960s, Fink photographed several more of his jazz heroes, including John Coltrane and Horace Parlan, performing at clubs in Manhattan. In later decades, Fink was hired by magazines to photograph an array of popular musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, Jay-Z, and Cheryl “Salt” James of Salt-N-Pepa, among many others.

Larry Fink

Fink’s long-term project on boxing was initiated by a 1986 assignment from the magazine Manhattan, inc. to photograph boxing trainer Jimmy Jacobs in the lead up to the national television debut fight of his young protégé, Mike Tyson. Fink grew fascinated with the world of boxing and went on to frequent gyms in and around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the next decade. “The excessive opposites active in and latent within the sport drew me in,” Fink wrote in his 1997 book on the work. “I found a world so rife with anecdote and pathos, so full of contradictions as to be a world within itself.” Fink’s boxing photographs depict both the physical aggression and fraternity inherent in the sport, as well as the referees, ring girls, audiences, and other supporting characters who contribute to the spectacle of live fights.

Larry Fink

As his commercial career gained momentum in the 1980s and ’90s, Fink received a steady stream of commissions to photograph haute couture, star-studded events, and other topics related to America’s glitzy upper classes. His photographs of fashion shows in New York, Paris, Milan, and elsewhere subvert viewers’ expectations by focusing on the chaos and human drama taking place behind-the-scenes rather than designer-clad models strutting the runways. In 2000, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter hired Fink to photograph the magazine’s annual Oscars afterparty. Fink attended the event almost every year for the next decade, capturing Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, and other celebrities drinking, schmoozing, and attempting to maintain the veneer of glamour that got them there.

Larry Fink

Fink’s lifelong engagement with politics is a recurring theme in his work. As a young photographer during the tumultuous 1960s, Fink photographed Malcolm X speaking in Harlem, pro- and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations across Manhattan, Coretta Scott King supporting the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, and student protestors at Columbia University, among other notable subjects. Later in his career, Fink was hired by leading magazines to photograph important political stories, such a Vanity Fair article that followed presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In 2017, Fink attended the Women’s March in Washington DC, where he made hopeful photographs of fellow demonstrators, which he compiled into the self-published photobook The Outpour.