LarryFink

Larry Fink (1941, Brooklyn – 2023, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania) was an American photographer and educator best known for his unflinching, flash-lit black-and-white images of people at parties and other social gatherings. Raised in a politically conscious Jewish household on Long Island — he described himself as “a Marxist from Long Island” — he studied at the New School for Social Research in New York, where the photographer Lisette Model was among his teachers and an early champion of his work.

Fink worked as a professional photographer for more than fifty-five years, using unconventional angles and the bright drama of on-camera flash to produce intimate, sometimes unflattering glimpses of his subjects. His best-known body of work, Social Graces, produced through the 1970s, juxtaposed wealthy Manhattanites at fashionable clubs and society events with working-class families from rural Pennsylvania at gatherings such as high-school graduations. The series was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and appeared in book form in 1984, with a reviewer for The New York Times praising its ability to provide “excruciatingly intimate glimpses of real people and their all-too-fallibly-human lives.”

Beyond Social Graces, Fink photographed extensively in the worlds of boxing, jazz, fashion runways, and politics, and in 2001 produced a satirical color series imagining the Bush administration in scenes of Weimar-style decadence, later exhibited as The Forbidden Pictures. He taught for decades at Bard College (1988–2017), as well as at Yale, Cooper Union, Parsons, and New York University, shaping generations of younger photographers.

His photographs are held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and he received two Guggenheim Fellowships (1976, 1979), two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award in 2015. Fink died in 2023 at his home in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.