Certain things are expected of a working photographer. If the assignment is a social event? Pictures of smiling partygoers. A political campaign? Shots of the candidate kissing babies and pressing the flesh. All this went out the window when you hired Larry Fink. For more than 50 years, Larry, who died in 2023, remained steadfastly indifferent to journalistic convention. And that’s why his photographs are considered not just part of the documentary record but art.
“I was always insecure, and anxiety-filled, and guilt-ridden because photography, by definition, is invasive,” he told an interviewer for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2023. Once he was in, however, Larry would make himself comfortable, returning to the scene of an assignment again and again, minus a press pass and a clear objective.
When he got home, Larry would put the pictures in a box and forget about them. And there they would stay, for years, sometimes decades. The material for several of his earlier books was drawn from this hoard, but only with this revelatory volume can we begin to take stock of Larry’s true output. —Ash Carter
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-author of Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
