Saturday, May 06, 2006

Larry Fink Beneath the Surface

Photo Copyright Larry Fink 2006

Photograph Copyright Larry Fink All Rights Reserved 2006


At the website for Larry Fink's agent, Bill Charles take a look at Fink's Oscar night party pix.
Under The Surface The Stephen Cohen Gallery website also shows some of the photos taken by Larry Fink, whose snooted flash lighting and Dutch tilts transcend the conventions of event photography.

Lurking in the Shadows With Lethal Flash

Photo Larry Fink Copyright 2006

Lurking in the unlit fringe of society functions, Larry Fink captures photographs that can sometimes startle and illuminate. Oh so cruel or just brutally honest?

I leave that for you to decide.

The Stephen Cohen Gallery website describes Fink's work as:

... a thought-provoking social commentary that demonstrates Fink’s ability to reveal the intimate in the most crowded of settings and the flaw in the most perfect of scenes. The images are iconic black-and-white photographs of American VIPs, Hollywood players, boxers, runway models and blue collar workers. In a photo of George Plimpton blowing smoke rings to the amusement of a young Ivanka Trump and her model friends, and in a surreptitiously captured shot of rising starlets just outside the glow of the red carpet, as in all his images, Fink illuminates the private and unexpected moments we would otherwise rarely see. A master of the “snapshot aesthetic,” Larry Fink is in the esteemed ranks of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.

Fink reflects on his work,“Some people mistake my work for satire. I don’t object because satire is a powerful force, so if the work is seen that way it serves one function. But I don’t agree. The pictures are taken in the spirit of finding myself in the other, or finding the other in myself. They are taken in the spirit of empathy. Emotional, physical, sensual empathy. This work is political, but not polemical. There is potential for the formation of an underlying theme in how the system suppresses and distorts both the rich and the poor, but it is not Marx who chooses the characters in this book; it is lust, attraction, and destiny.”

No comments: