Larry Fink
New York photographer who found the human angle on Warhol’s factory, Beat poets and boxers
LARRY FINK, who has died aged 82, was an acclaimed photographer whose subjects ranged from jazz musicians to boxers and from members of Andy Warhol’s factory to celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet.
He called himself a “Marxist from Long Island” and there was fury in US Republican circles in 2004 when, at a university, he exhibited a photograph of a smirking George W Bush lookalike, his left hand cupping the breast of a woman in a negligée. In an essay, Fink called Bush a “frat boy with charisma” and attacked the “fundamentalist neoconservative conspiracy”. The woman in the photograph, he said, was a metaphor for the whole world.
Fink was best known for Social Graces,a 1979 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, which juxtaposed black-andwhite photos of wealthy New Yorkers at play with shots of his working-class neighbours having more modest fun in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where he lived on a farm. The New York Times called them “excruciatingly intimate glimpses of real people and their all-too-fallibly human lives.”
Though Fink felt an outsider in the glitzy world of Manhattan, he always sought the vulnerable human being behind the facade, even when it came to the most brittle socialite: “Emotions are primary to all of us, and it’s that which allows us the empathy factor. In my way of thinking that’s how I need to photograph, to go inside the other person somehow and find what it is about them which is also about me.”
His distinctive visual style – he always used a handheld flash separate from his camera – was soon to be seen in The New York Times, Vanity Fair and GQ Magazine
– and solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the David Hill Gallery in London.
One person Fink refused to photograph was Donald Trump. When Vanity Fair asked him to document his inaugural ball, he declined. “I didn’t want to photograph him… I thought he was a horrible person.” Instead, he photographed a women’s march the following day.
Larry Fink was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 11 1941 to “Leftist but bourgeois” parents. His father, Bernard Fink, was a lawyer in the insurance industry, his mother Sylvia, née Caplan, a political activist described by her son as a “mink Marxist”. Great partygoers, they were fans of Cab Calloway and Count Basie, and moved in radical artistic circles.
The teenage Fink began “stealing cars and cursing out my algebra teacher and kicking the vice-principal in the groin”. He was sent to a progressive boarding school in western Massachusetts, where he was inspired by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and enjoyed midnight discussions about Marxist theory and Buddhism.
Soon Fink was photographing the Beat poets, artists and musicians of the Greenwich Village counter-culture scene. A favourite haunt was the Village Gate jazz club, where Charlie Mingus and John Coltrane were regulars. He called the Beats his first “tribe” and he went on to explore other tribes, in a lifelong “investigation into what it meant to be alive”.
Notable among these were his photographs of gritty boxing matches. Instead of focusing on the gore, he documented the cameraderie among the fighters, including a young Mike Tyson.
In 1999 Fink was put under contract by Vanity Fair and for the next 12 years he documented the magazine’s famous Oscar parties. Unlike other photographers who looked for smiles, he preferred to shoot celebrities in unguarded moments. “At the beginning publicists wouldn’t let me near their people. But then I was branded as the ‘candid guy’. Then they started to like me.”
Fink’s first marriage to Joan Snyder was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Martha Posner, and a daughter from his first marriage.