A Human Among Humans

I first became aware of Larry Fink, who died in 2023, sometime in the 1980s when I bought an oversize postcard of one of his pictures. It showed one of his neighbors in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, a lady with a mischievous expression, her tongue lodged in a corner of her mouth, squinting over a revolver she is aiming straight at the camera. I didn’t intend to mail the postcard—in fact, I still have it. I was drawn by its comic danger, its ambiguity, its seeming to come out of nowhere. Who was the subject? Who was the photographer? What was their connection? There was something about the wallpaper behind her that suggested the gun might be loaded, I thought. I wanted to keep at hand that electric moment, possibly in the fourth or fifth hour of a well-lubricated party, when jollity might suddenly be tipping over into mayhem. Maybe what I wanted to keep was the photographer’s sangfroid, or maybe it was the apparent trust between artist and subject. I wasn’t sure, just that I felt a little more alive every time I looked at it. I kept it tacked up above my desk for years.

Then, about a decade and a half later, I took a job at Bard College, part of the time in the photography department, and there I met Larry. Immediately, the picture snapped into focus. Not only was Larry capable of establishing trust with his subject, he was also capable of egging her on. She wasn’t aiming her gun at some faceless magazine representative from the big city—they were cronies, partners in crime of a sort, and the picture documented the kind of horseplay to which they were very likely accustomed. Larry adjusted the emotional temperature in any room he entered. He was loose as a goose, humming with energy, bouncing on his feet, now and then pulling out his mouth harp and delivering a blast of Little Walter bent notes. He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated that he had no need to prove it. He could loosen up his students—or if they were sufficiently stuck up, he could terrify them. To those students he might have seemed a bit like the lady in his photograph: jolly, entertaining, unpredictable, and possibly about to go off on them.

By the time I met him, I’d indexed Larry in my mind as a social photographer. From what I’d seen, he seemed most drawn to indoor chaos, spaces crowded with cross-purposes under the heading of a common purpose: nightclubs, parties, balls, political campaigns. His pictures had a you-are-there intensity. Bodies slammed this way and that, some of them inches from the lens and others in deep focus, everybody’s head and body partly obscured by someone else’s or chopped off by the frame, smiles and laughs and scowls and grimaces all stirred together, sometimes every human figure in a given composition occupying a different emotional space from all the others. Those pictures supplied the decibel level—so loud you couldn’t hear anything in particular—and the jostles, shoves, and brushes of all those human bodies. Larry was patient enough to blend into the wallpaper as needed, but he resisted the presumption of invisibility and omniscience. His photos inscribed his own physical presence in the room. Other photographers had worked the same turf for a bit—Garry Winogrand, for example, with his New York City 1960s parties—but Larry clearly didn’t see social events as a disposable theme. For him, they were life itself, even if they occurred in distant and hermetic social realms.

I thought I’d known that much about Larry as a photographer. Then in 2014, he published The Beats. Larry’s chronicles of his youth resonated so powerfully with the experience of my own youth, albeit a couple of decades later, that they gave me a whole new context for looking at his work. The book’s photos relate the story of Larry and his friends—“poets, thieves, goofers—junkies all,” he called them—enrolled in the second wave of the Beat Generation, the one that missed the headlines, as they travel down to Mexico to work on a movie that will never be made. “It was my fate to be aligned with the Beats because of my propensity for drugs, anger, and poetry,” Fink told Laurie Dahlberg in 2005. He and his cronies lived in a basement apartment on MacDougal Street, which at the time was the Broadway of the Beat/folk crowd and lined end to end with bars and espresso cafés; later, he moved to an apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park. His friends included Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), neither depicted here, but the story the pictures tell is not about individual personalities. It is about a collective experience, bohemia, which was at one time thought to embody an eternal principle: that you could live on almost nothing and free your mind, as long as you got together with your four best friends, split the rent on an apartment nobody else wanted, ate mainly oatmeal and amphetamines, and worked hard on your visions. The first Beats were passionate and hopped up, talking all night in cafeterias, suddenly darting off to Denver or San Francisco, writing novels in nonstop speed marathons. 

Here, though, we see an array of attractive young white people, looking serious or looking inward, loitering in various settings—loitering even when they’re on the move. They aren’t shown doing anything or really interacting (except lovemaking, but we’ll get to that). There is no urgency to them. They don’t look especially ragged or starved, although in their time they might have been perceived as unkempt for, say, unbuttoning more than the prescribed number of buttons. They look exactly like people I would have known fifteen years later in my own youth (in part because we wore the same sportswear, although ours came from deadstock warehouses in North Dakota). But we had jobs, because we had to; Larry’s people live on loans, handouts, and the rare score. Their rent might only be twenty bucks a month—but adjust that for inflation. Many of Larry’s subjects are undoubtedly stoned, and some may be feeling faint from lack of calories, but most of them give off existential-struggle vibes. They loiter, they slump, they lie sleepless but listless on army cots. Their lives are an arte povera; they inhabit empty rooms. They struggle to make the visions come. But now and then they allow themselves to go to the park with a blanket and a friend and do that one thing that doesn’t cost money.

The pictures immediately made me think of Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1956), which concerns the Parisian equivalents to Larry’s crowd a decade earlier. The bohemians in those pictures have a similar listless affect, although they sleep in little rats’ nests under the eaves (unseen) and conduct all their other significant daily activities at a café. One of them is shown passed out, head on the table, with a sign next to his head requesting funds so he can go make love (and some crumpled notes lie next to the sign); Larry’s crowd would have approved. Fink’s Beats also shares qualities with Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971), although free of its weapons and cars and exhibitions of drug abuse. The fact that Larry Fink’s tribe was by and large destined for more stable and prosperous lives thereafter does not erase the fact that, for a few years between the late 1950s and early 1960s, it chased the ineffable, looked for signs, poked payphones for stray dimes, drank red jug wine that tasted like vinegar, smoked weed grown in ditches in Indiana, and spent days sitting around being massively, almost transcendentally, bored.

And Larry chose to record it with his Leica, in moody portraits and duos that establish an atmosphere of late afternoon in summer stretching on and on. You wonder whether he was deliberately going for reverie or if his people were just that dazed and anomic. A coffee-shop scene shows six people, closely packed, all looking dreamily in different directions. The pictures gain in sweetness when you imagine Larry taking them, sitting in those rooms, being one with his subjects—although while they wondered what to do with their lives, he already knew what he was doing with his, and was doing it.

He was born in 1941 to left-wing Jewish parents who had made an early jump to the Long Island suburbs. He was raised with a sense of social justice and responsibility and respect for the arts. His father sold insurance to the painters Moses and Raphael Soyer, who became family friends. The first and maybe earliest photo in Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking, a new volume from powerHouse Books, shows a model sitting next to her depiction by Moses, wearing the same clothes as in the painting, her hands and feet turned in studied painterly configurations. It is a stunt picture, a mise en abyme, something that could have run in a rubric in LIFE or Look, and yet it is also somehow entirely natural and unaffected and pure. A bit later, there is a pictorialist study of a standing nude in a studio that evokes both Sargent and Seurat—Larry had the eye and the instinct by the time he was seventeen.

Having in the meantime given college a miss after a few months, he headed out to the street, where he was immediately interested in how people use space. He went for portraits often, or small groups, people against settings: hat and newspaper racks, ducktail and frantic hand-lettered sale posters, kids playing in Harlem streets with almost no cars. By then he had a copy of Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment (1952)—notice his high-angle narrative condensations, a character with the stairs he has climbed or the incline he is headed down—and a bit later, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958): piled-on signage, private dramas in public, fun with smeary lights. He is more of a romantic than either of those photographers, though. His Times Square looks more like Louis Faurer’s than Frank’s, more lonely and noble—although the dog yanking on the cowboy-hatted customer’s pants leg already seems very much like Larry’s own property. Beatniks pose among an assortment of discarded mirrors and rugs and make like hoodlums invading a Walker Evans photo; a beggar with a cigar box might be on loan from W. Eugene Smith; citizens confront their solitude on empty corners or on the Staten Island Ferry at off-peak. Everything in the city is old and much of it is depopulated, aside from a hand here, a pair of legs under a heap of bunting there.

Larry got busted on his way back from Mexico (with “a belt of marijuana for New York,” as in Ginsberg’s Howl), but luckily his parole officer and a kindly priest pushed him into pursuing photo assignments, for the Lexington School for the Deaf and for the Catholic press (cute little Irish girls primping for their first communions). Then his mother arranged for Larry to study privately with Lisette Model, the Austrian émigré photographer most famous for her acerbic portraits of the rich airing their private selves on benches along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice before the war. She became a prominent member of the Photo League and taught many New York street photographers, including Diane Arbus, Leon Levinstein, and Rosalind Fox Solomon. Larry didn’t attend her classes, with their competitiveness and crosstalk, but received house calls from her; she never discussed her own work or showed him any of it, although you could swear that she had. They shared a sociopolitical outlook and an inclination toward street portraiture, and she may have helped infuse him with the spirit of surrealism in daily life that links his early work with Brassaï and André Kertész. Most importantly, she infused Fink with what he came to call “sensual empathy,” which is to say that his pictures are not taken by a hovering eyeball but by a human being who will naturally react in a variety of ways to other humans and their behavior.

Since Larry was a hepcat of the first water it followed that he would be deeply affected by music. At the start of his career he was treated kindly by the blues shouter Jimmy Rushing—“Mr. Five by Five,” who was “as big as love,” in Larry’s words—and he went on to photograph jazz musicians in the heyday of New York clubs like Slugs, the Five Spot, and the Jazz Gallery. He documented the great John Coltrane at his peak; followed Steve Lacy, Sirone, and Leroy Jenkins of the Revolutionary Ensemble over decades; was hip to the younger set that arose in the 1980s, such as Roy Hargrove. He shot the rehearsal process as well as impassioned performances in dark rooms, where pixelated reflections on horn bells could produce graphic representations of notes. Those photographs also anticipate the darkness-and-light dynamics he was to exploit in his later party shots. Dark rooms in Fink’s work always signify performance, as well as an abolition of time that allows spontaneity to be permanently engraved.

Concurrently, he was photographing the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as well as teaching photography to inner-city children in community programs. As distinct from his slightly older contemporaries—Frank, Winogrand, Friedlander, et al.—Fink could not maintain a studied neutral distance in his work. He was an engaged photographer. He did not overtly editorialize in his pictures, and certainly never thumbed the scale, but his sympathies were unmistakable. His picture of Malcolm X speaking as an aide holds up a blown-up photo of the scarred corpse of Medgar Evers is as vivid a summation of the escalating tensions in the civil rights struggle after 1963 as any of the more familiar news photos of the time. And he was there when the left began arming itself, beginning with the Black Panthers in Oakland.

It was Larry’s social conscience that moved him to undertake a project that seemed at first glance far removed from the struggle, or from his usual field of interests. He wanted to see what power actually looked like, so in the early 1970s he undertook to become a society photographer in the usual sense of the term. He bought a tuxedo and began covering the gatherings of the rich and powerful at discotheques, gallery openings, debutante cotillions, Metropolitan Museum balls, English-Speaking Union balls, the Russian Ball, among many others. He once and for all took up the handheld flash and the square-format twin lens, the necessary tools of the trade. He moved among people so used to being photographed, by paparazzi and others, that they barely noticed when the flash went off in their faces. Inspired by the brutal Weimar-era paintings and prints of George Grosz and Otto Dix, he found individual portraits of power, contempt, and alienation: a liver-spotted fist rests menacingly on another figure’s lapel; a man’s tilted wine glass obliterates the face of the person speaking to him; a dancer looks out at the void from over her partner’s shoulder. But he was also able to find innocence, desire, the joy of performance, and even occasionally the euphoria of release, as in his often-reproduced Studio 54 photo of the dancer with the floating braid and torsioned neck. He also photographed the plus-ones, the military escorts, the hangers-on, the wait staff, all the accessories to the figures in the center of the room, because to him they occupied just as much psychic and physical space.

Fink’s first monograph, Social Graces (1984), juxtaposes his New York society pictures with photographs taken at social events held by his adopted neighbors in the rural hamlet of Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where he bought a farm in 1974. He had gotten to know them thoroughly, especially the extended Sabatine family, by the time he took the startlingly intimate photos in the book. They were obviously shot with the same equipment in the same format as the big-city shots, and just as in those pictures, dancers pop out of the darkness, lovers carry on oblivious to being observed, and various degrees of elation, hilarity, and intoxication are recorded while other emotions swirl around them. The settings could not be more different. The people in Martins Creek are small farmers working on a subsistence level, exactly the kind of citizens that political rhetoric of all persuasions has airily referred to since the beginning of the republic. They may own a piece of land and an old farmhouse, but they are poor, their work is hard, and their pleasures are few. When a child’s birthday comes around, three generations show up to celebrate, because they can’t afford to pass up an occasion. Or maybe it’s only two generations—people there seem to be young until they’re not any longer. The young are heartbreaking; they are living in the moment, full of radiant hope, and we feel as if we know what the next moment will be. The oldest ones have been there and back; they can be salty. Aside from a few variables of clothing and hairstyle, many of the scenes Fink photographs could have occurred any time in the past century and a half.

Nobody flinches from Larry’s flash, even when it goes off in the most intimate of circumstances: teenagers at a necking party, a girl who has had too much to drink, older people getting amorous. The combination of flash and intimacy can’t help but evoke Weegee, if his bus home from Los Angeles had broken down somewhere in the Alleghenies. Weegee’s photos of these scenes might have been pitiless—think of his canoodling couple caught with infrared film in the upper balcony at the movies, where the glare becomes the usher’s flashlight, ogling and censorious. Larry’s flash, though, seems to be accepted as an extension of him, and he is clearly in the picture even if out of frame. He’s sitting there at the bar next to the Kools smoker or across from the laughing partygoers; he’s admiring the one-year-old grandchild; he’s being pretend-shot by one of the aunts who’s had a few. People are always depicted to their advantage; even the drunk girl looks good in her stupor. Fink finds the same kinds of patterns and cockeyed symmetries as in his New York society shots, and there’s a similar ratio of joy to melancholy, so the two sets extend, rather than undermine, one another. There’s just too much common humanity between them, for all the obvious disparities. Yes, the rich are different; they have more money.

Larry is becoming countrified by this point. He looks for characters everywhere he goes, as ever, and now he finds them in stick insects and praying mantises, which he photographs heroically, silhouetted against the sky. He turns up new sources of poetry in sheds and strip mines and houses built up against the railroad tracks. He witnesses childbirth and what comes before and after, seeming to guard against sentimentality, although that might just be exhaustion. He sees death in the form that only country graveyards are equipped to evoke, with their bumpy ground and heaving stones. On assignment, he devotes an essay to the loggers of the Pacific Northwest, finding scenes reminiscent of the work of Darius Kinsey, who documented the trade in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, a century or more ago, making tableaux of massive timbers dwarfing loggers that are hard for the present-day mind to process. Fink’s photos are inevitably in a diminished scale, because the behemoths that were in such profusion when Kinsey was working all fell long ago, leaving ragged hillsides with lesser stumps, some of which look merely broken off. It is the loggers themselves who are responsible for maintaining the continuity, especially when Fink shows them dominating their landscape by simply standing in it.

Larry began photographing boxing in the mid-Eighties with an assignment from the short-lived but influential Manhattan, inc., yet he kept at it on his own for at least a decade, shooting mainly in gyms in Philadelphia. One photo from these years weirdly rhymes with Weegee’s Cop Killer—a short man with disheveled clothes is shoved to a measuring line on the wall by a bearlike cop whose back is to us. Larry’s boxer occupies the same space and amount of light as the killer, although his trainer looks more like the cop behind the killer’s back. Because boxing’s lower levels in a city like Philadelphia are poor and scrappy, and are still using gyms and rings that date back at least to the glory days of the 1950s, the photos will inevitably evoke film noir, and Larry leans into it. He compiles an impressively voluptuous catalog of skin tones, varied as to color and moisture; he has honed his ability to convey the texture of all racial variations. We episodically follow the career of Harold “Awesome Force” Rhodes, in his hooded sateen robe, as he shows up, weighs in, gets clobbered, and slinks off afterward. Did he lose to Mike Tyson, shown victorious across the page? Boxers are performers, but they are also laborers who lose a bit of themselves to the job every day.

Modeling is a job not unlike boxing. It requires its employees to attain peak physical condition, which ages them out rapidly; it treats them like meat and forgets their names immediately, aside from a few stars; it surrounds them with attendants backstage and then sends them out to face the crowd half-naked and alone. Larry’s models in Runway (2000) tend not to be stars—they are young and maybe half-formed and spend a great deal of their time standing and waiting. There is less intimacy on view here than in most of Larry’s occupational series, partly because the models have learned how to avoid the male gaze and partly because he is but one of the many photographers who will have come through that day, some of whom are in fact pictured. Once again Larry’s photographs impressionistically chronicle a process, from the fittings to the shape-up to the catwalk (an elderly Martha Graham at ringside, not to mention Anna Wintour), to the end of the night when they leave the building. There, he makes his own fashion photos out of available materials, balancing his models against the decor, which is at once tawdrily baroque and institutionally bleak.

In The Vanities (2011), Larry took everything he’d learned about humans, their expressions of fellowship and cheer or imitations thereof, their clannishness and vanity, their endurance levels and degrees of intoxication, and applied it to a society of professional performers that is at once a real social world and a facsimile of one for media purposes. The world of movie people—overlapping with a few other professions in the arts, such as music and pornography—is one of projected images. The players mirror and anticipate public tastes, attitudes, and aspirations. They are paid professional metaphors; to paraphrase Jim Morrison, they are erotic politicians—representatives of desire. It therefore follows that their parties will offer a portrait of their times.

Larry photographs celebrities the same way he would photograph anyone else, less for their celebrity than for how well they will contribute to the picture. Sometimes a celebrity is the subject of a portrait: Robert Altman, Jay-Z, Grace Jones, David Bowie. Sometimes the celebrity’s identity becomes a punchline: as a starlet throws her head back while someone kisses her on the throat, the grim figure of Puritan judgment behind her is none other than George Plimpton. Sometimes a celebrity appears as bewildered and overlooked as we would be: Harry Dean Stanton and Dennis Hopper stranded on a couch, surrounded by backs, or Mort Zuckerman, who seems to be looking deep into his soul, all alone on a crowded floor. Often people are pictured who project glamour, as if we should know who they are, although we don’t. The only people liable to be caught overtly acting are unknowns, with the exception of Donatella Versace. The noncelebrities are hopefuls or employees or escorts or investors or sponsor liaisons or security. They are no less significant, but they do not carry the weight of subtext borne by the celebrities, who present us with some portion of their résumés every time they appear. 

Fink’s flash, and his appreciation of darkness, evoke Caravaggio and Brassaï. His casual approach to celebrity, as well as his off-center framing, are reminiscent of John Swope, the LIFE photographer who had been an actor and knew Henry Fonda and James Stewart from way back. Larry once vividly described his working tempo as “slow as a bear, fast as a hare.” In every one of these pictures something is happening that is interrupted by something else: shadows, or errant limbs or heads, or unwitting photobombing from the rear, or just the intruding edge of the frame. Professional smilers show up here and there, but most people are caught somewhere between emotions. Some people, especially the famous ones, are clearly at work and not exactly enjoying themselves. There are suggestions of depravity around the edges, and there is one photo of staged live sex, with a bottom whose breasts are such perfect domes I initially thought she might be a love doll. But the mood overall is strained. Exhaustion seems to rule; every person depicted is in some measure just going through the motions. There is not much left of the bacchanalian Seventies or the coke-fueled Eighties or the nouveau-riche Nineties. Business has conquered the world, these pictures say, and everything that happens is expected to serve it. Our only hope lies in intimacy, in those small moments of human connection—hands clutching hands; a child looking up in wonder; Meryl Streep talking and Natalie Portman listening, eyes closed. Those are the real events, occurring in the shadows cast by the megawatt party light.

Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking closes with a cavalcade of beauty: pictures that don’t follow a chronology and have little in common, necessarily, beyond their luxury of light and texture and line and weight—what is often called abstraction. (But can a photograph ever be truly abstract?) There are hands, bones, snouts, fronds, stains, shoes, flowers, wrinkles, statuary, dead birds, bits of ceremony, soft-core erotica, water droplets frozen by strobe light, and finally, a path of light through a dark wood, which seems like a succinct metaphor for everything that has come before it. Larry believes in light and its companion, shadow, as much as he believes in the inexhaustible variety of human beings and the forms and degrees of connection among them. He has been our spy, our witness, our explorer in the human jungle, and here are the specimens he has brought back, annotated by his emotions.