My Interview with Photographer Larry Fink in the October/November 2020 AUFBAU Magazine

Photographer Larry Fink Talks about his Life, Art, and Embracing Social Justice

Larry Fink is an American photographer most famous for his 1970s pictures of the privledged elite attending black tie fêtes in NYC. Rather than glamour shots, these photographs combined a social critique of capitalist decadence with a tactile exploration of casusal sensuality. While photographing “the haves”, Fink has also spent a lifetime creating images about the “have-nots”. Included in this visual exploration were pictures of his working classs neighbors in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania. These images were paired and contrasted with the New York decadents in his influential 1984 monograph Social Graces. 

 

Fink was raised in a home dedicated to social justice and this been a contstant thread through his oeuvre. Raised on Long Island in the 1950s, his mother was politically active in socialist causes. His sister was also an advocate for the disenfrancised and worked as a noted lawyer who was able to win reperations for inmates of the famous Attica Prison Revolt.  

 

Fink has spent a lifetime teaching the photographic artform “from Yale to jail” as he proudly croons and over 25 years as a professor at Bard College. His work has been displayed internationally in solo exhibitions including at New York’s MoMA and Whitney museums. In addition to receiving multiple Guggeneheim and NEA awards, he was the reciepient of the Internationl Center of Photography’s 2015 Infinity Award for Art. 

 

On the cusp of his becoming an octagenarian, Fink has been spending the days since the pandemic hit, holed up on his farm. Instead of documenting the volitile Black Lives Matter protests that have been taking place all across America (and the world), the photographer has been looking back and archiving the historical images he shot during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. While under the Covid lock-down and civil unrest in America, Fink agreed to talk to Miles Ladin about a life engaged with art and social justice.

Malcolm X, Harlem, 1963

“I was 23 or 24, something like that. I was doing my first job teaching in a program called,  HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited), a social activism organization which would soon be supported by Johnson’s Great Society initiative, I believe it was 1963-4.  So, I was in Harlem every day; day in and day out. I used to go up to the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X (the American civil Rights activist) would speak on Thursday nights, when I was working up in Harlem. Two or three weeks before this one particular night, Malcolm had been in Cleveland, Ohio where he was delivering this speech called ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’, a very powerful famous speech. So, I was in the background, not photographing mind you, I didn’t photograph then, I was just a voyeur, if you will, but not with any sophisticated overtones. And a young woman in the front row listening to Malcolm, got up and said ‘Malcolm, remember you just spoke these words: the ballot or the bullet?’ She turned around and pointed to me, I was the only white guy in the audience. She pointed to me and said ‘I got a bullet for that guy back there!’ Needless to say, I felt a little assaulted. Malcolm replied  ‘Sit down sister. That man’s gonna vote with you. That’s that!

 

I only photographed Malcolm twice. Once at the Audubon, I did a quick snapshot but I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to be photographing there, I didn’t consider myself a photojournalist and I had no big mission. I just was there. In terms of photojournalism, my life has been photojournalistic, has been fine art photography, has been this, has been that, but basically my photographs are about the mission of living, it’s not the mission of being a photojournalist with that kind of heavy responsibility. It’s about the idea of being alive at the moment, within the moment and trying to somehow or another communicate the moment in ways that enhance beauty, enhance commonality, and basic truth.

 

In this particular photograph, we are looking at Malcolm giving a speech at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa. I don’t remember his exact words, obviously, he was talking about someone who was murdered and talking as Malcom did in his very clear and confrontational style. He was a beautiful man. A fair man.

 

Another time there was a big riot of all kinds of ways and meanings, near the hotel Theresa once again and other Leaders were there trying to quiet down the crowd, nothing was effective. Finally, what happened, in a convertible, Malcolm came driving up with his people, saying not a word and all he did was raise his hands, and where all the other people (including Ralph Abernathy and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.) were trying to keep things down but they couldn’t do a thing. Malcolm just wordlessly raised his hands and the people quieted down and went home. In the Spike Lee film, Malcolm X, there was a little episode about this particular engagement and two policemen said “Nobody should have that much power.” And indeed, Malcolm had that kind of power. And that’s the power that we have to think he was killed for because he was a leader par none.

 

I believed in Malcolm, and I believed in the movement and I had no qualms about it at all. And I wasn’t frightened except when that young woman pointed at me with a bullet in mind and that didn’t make me feel very comfortable. (laughter) not at all. However, Malcolm saved my life and thanks Malcolm!”

Harlem Youth, 1964

"When I wasn’t teaching the kids at HARYOU, I was roaming the Harlem streets photographing this and that and anything that came to my eye.  Indeed, this came to my eye, and what a lovely lovely picture it is. There’s no message, there’s no story, there’s just the picture and just the glory of the moment. 

 

Due to the Covid pandemic, I’m not currently engaged with the Black Lives Matter people. I am however engaged with the ideas and the magnificent outpour. But in many ways, the Black Lives Matter is a collectivist groundswell which comes really out of the deep necessity for some kind of freedom to start to become the word and the play of the day. And this for my way of thinking is really really good, because it’s not about charisma nor is it about the very American idea that an individual will lead you to the promised land. Basically, the promised land is your land, and the land that you live on is the land that you will then inherent. This land is your land, as they say in the (famous Woody Guthrie) song."

 

 

 Fink Family, mid-1950s

“Here, we have a picture of my Father, my mother, and my sister, that was in the basement of our house in West Hempstead, Long Island. And they were bourgeois people, but they were communists. And mom was a communist organizer but liked to wear mink stoles. She liked pleasure and voluptuous aspects and wouldn’t give it up for a moment. In fact, she left the party because she was thrown out of the party and the party people, puritans like so many Americans, said ‘how can you behave this way, Sylvia, with your minks!’  And she’d say ‘Fuck you…shouldn’t everybody live this way!’ So, she was very enlightened in terms of understanding the contradictions. They were very much for a long while in favor of the Soviet Union. Not necessarily to overthrow the American government, certainly not.  But the idea that socialism was being explored and experimented with. When Stalin came in and everything became very putrefied and evil, she was saddened but not necessarily dissuaded from the idea about what communism or socialism could actually mean to the welfare of all people.

 

“My folks were internationalists, even though we were Jewish, the Jewish religion didn’t play much to do with my identity. ButI actually got bar mitzvahed by some odd choice. It was actually my fault that I did that…because of conformity and peer pressure. We lived on Long Island, surrounded by Jewish and bourgeois people. At my bar mitzvah in a temple which was a Quonset hut, we hired a black band to come in and play some blues and jazz and the Rabbi was a racist so when these black dudes came in with their saxophones and bass and drums, he said to us ‘who are these schwarzes and my mother said to him ‘fuck you! Sit down! We’re going to have a party now, so let’s swing!’ "

  Elizabeth Fink with Attica Brothers, 1991

“Attica was a famous US prison revolt in 1971. This picture shows my sister Lizzy Fink, the Attica Brothers, and some of the lawyers who worked with sister Liz on the Attica Brothers case. The prison revolt was the result of inmates wanting to negotiate better living conditions and education rights. The whole idea of prison is that you are supposed to be reassessing your life and perhaps opening up some redemptive qualities and you needed tools in which to do that. Education and other kinds of methods of communication were necessary. There were none at that time in Attica or at any prison for that matter. And the brothers were trying to negotiate for those moments. Governor Rockefeller who was then in charge, being macho and being Rockefeller, decided not to negotiate but to call out the National Guard to go around the turrets of the prison and to shoot anybody in sight and massacre the prisoners. He killed his own people too because it was arbitrary and disgusting.  And then they took Big Black, the leader, they took him and they made him lie naked and cut his body with glass and did all kinds of disgusting things. It was quite heinous.

 

Sister Liz worked on that case, she had just come out of Brooklyn Law, she got the case, and 28 years later she was able to settle the case for the brothers. And this is probably one of the moments. She worked on it pro bono, for all of those years…” 

 

 

 Maggie Kuhn and Sylvia Fink, 1991

 

 “The picture that we’re seeing here is Mom and Maggie Kuhn who was the leader of what they called the Grey Panthers. Which was a group of older people who had the same principles for socialism and justice and a multi-racial society, etc. This picture was actually shot for Esquire magazine. The assignment was to photograph beautiful women. And of course, as you could imagine the rest of the magazine was chocked full of voluptuous big breasted women doing wonderful things and not so wonderful things. I decided to photograph these two gals who were doing really wonderful things…not a breast amongst them. “

Larry Fink and Molly, 1982

 

"This is a self-portrait with my daughter Molly, when she was 3 or 4. After many years of working in the film industry, she’s now returned to school to become an arts educator. Anything that deals with the imagination, with consciousness, with trying to enable a human being to be a more of a full human being is part of the politic of right now and of yesteryear and the future.  So, everything that we do which has human fulfillment and human imagination as its central cause is a political act. My family has an intrinsic commitment to art and social justice. My daughter Molly, my wife the artist Martha Posner, my first wife and Molly’s mother, the painter Joanie Snyder, and myself are all involved in the broad sweep of human concern, and the broad sweep of what it means to help people be more alive than they are actually allowed to be under the culture that we seem to be living under. "

Women's March, Washington DC, 2017

"This was the Women’s March, after Trump’s inauguration (in Washington DC) which I was covering for Vanity Fair and covering for myself. These were some young women who were striding along with their masks and this young white guy behind them looking askance, slightly agitated perhaps even frightened, probably not of them but just of whole malaise indeed. I hadn’t seen anything like that since the 60’s, that outpour and it was beyond the 60s. I was unbelievably happy because it to was and is a groundswell. It’s spontaneously meeting the challenges of what it means to be free or not be free and what it means to attempt the idea of being alive. To be concerned, committed, and impactual."

 

 

Miles Ladin interview in SOLEDAD

Thanks to Marcelline Block for participating in this conversation on my recent work. Thanks to Jeremy Richey for publishing this interview in SOLEDAD magazine. You can order a printed copy on Amazon

Boris Lurie and his Battle Cry of NO!

published in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Aufbau magazine

"No" as an Answer

Boris Lurie survived the Riga ghetto and four German concentration camps. These experiences became the basis of a radical artistic examination of consumer culture and the art market. 

by Miles Ladin

There is a well-known story about the first-time John Lennon met Yoko Ono. In the fall of 1966, Ono had an exhibition at the Indica gallery in London titled, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. Lennon, entered the gallery and encountered a ladder leading up to a piece of paper stuck to the ceiling. When the Beatle walked up the ladder to read the piece of paper he was greeted by the word YES. The joyful optimism expressed through the work titled Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, was enough to spark intense curiosity about its maker, Ono. The rest is history and Lennon often recounted this important moment.  In a 1971 Rolling Stoneinterview, Lennon explained “I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes.'”

At the same time in New York City, another artist by the name of Boris Lurie not only relished the word “no” but in fact used it as a de facto “fuck you” by adding an exclamation point and extending the English lexicon to include NO! For Lurie, NO! was his visual imperative, his life view, and from 1959 the name of the art movement he founded with fellow artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. Although one could easily discount the word no, as John Lennon had, as being a word of cynicism and nihilism, for Lurie it became a radical battle cry to save humanity from itself as well as an artistic call to action.

The conceptual art of Yoko Ono stands in stark contrast to that of the lesser known Boris Lurie. Her body of work is often spoken about in relation to Zen Buddhism.  She lived through the WWII bombing of Tokyo and along with her late husband John Lennon is a fierce advocate for a simplistic (if appealing) dream of world peace.  Boris Lurie also survived WWII but his life experience and the message he chose to channel through his art was radically different. 

Born in 1924 to a Jewish family in Leningrad, Lurie was interned in four different concentration camps during WWII. By the time the Allies liberated him in 1945 from a Buchenwald satellite camp, his mother, grandmother, sister, and childhood sweetheart had all been shot at the Rumbula Massacre. In 1946, Lurie emigrated with his father from Germany to New York City where from memory he documented the horror of his wartime experience into powerful drawings and paintings. 

The memory works of war were soon joined by dedicated images of women that moved towards a more modernist aesthetic. Now in his early 20s and experiencing the freedom of New York City, Lurie was able to explore his feelings towards women and sexuality outside of the camps. At the same time, he was still grieving over the female members of his family who were murdered.  This complex association with the female gender eventually produced pictures where the female body is segmented, creating works that contain both beauty and horror. It is with these pictures developed in the mid-1950s that Lurie starts to find his unique voice. 

While dedicating himself to his art, Lurie socialized with other artists and became aware of the growing market value towards new art, specifically abstract expressionism. In 1958, with Jasper Johns’ solo exhibition at the trendy new Leo Castelli gallery, pop art became a hot commodity that celebrated popular culture with an ironic joie de vivre sensibility.  Lurie, who was still reeling from his war time experience, found these incarnations of new art to be not only hollow but an insult towards the reality that he and other European Jews had recently endured.  

His indignation towards the art world ignited his growing disgust towards American consumerism and the trappings of post-war capitalism. This was the catalyst for both a more critical approach in Lurie’s art as well as the anti-establishment art movement of which he was a co-founder. The NO! art moment developed from a group of like-minded artists who exhibited at the cooperative March Gallery located on New York’s 10^thstreet. After Theodor Adorno’s famous 1949 pronouncement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” these artists decided to make a commitment to an art that confronted the atrocities of the recent past rather than ignoring them.  They positioned themselves against the more palatable art movements of the day, which they considered decadent and consciously stayed outside the prevailing art world. 

Lurie’s creative response to pop art was to turn that idiom on its head. The artist co-opted pop art and created paintings using the motif of magazine pin-up girls. Rather than a celebration of sexuality, these works critiqued the commodification of sex and were often emblazoned with the word NO.  In the early 1960s, Lurie extended this body of work by combining the pin-ups with images portraying victims of concentration camps after the liberation.  Both dead and alive, the juxtaposition between the victims of genocide and the objectified subjects of pornography are extremely jarring.  

Other works that are equally confrontational include, Immigrant’s NO Suitcase (Anti-Pop), 1963. Painted on a suitcase typical of those clutched by Jews forced from the ghettos and onto cattle cars by the Nazis, Lurie has transformed this iconic object with color, slogans, pinups, and a swastika. The viewer is made to engage with these visual signifiers on various levels at a time when the culture at large was trying to forget the six million dead. Lurie’s work can still be difficult to contemporary viewers. In 2009 at the ArtHamptons fair another work combining pin-ups with a swastika titled Lumumba is Dead (Adieu Amérique)from 1961garnered a complaint and was ultimately censored from the exhibition.

Incredibly, Lurie’s powerful oeuvre was not limited to the visual arts. The artist wrote a novel, the House of Anita, that was never published in his lifetime. The book is semi-autobiographical and deals with the traumas that Lurie suffered during WWII. As a metaphor for man’s degradation towards man, the novel integrates sexual sadomasochism into the disturbing narrative. The novel is available in English, Russian, and will soon be printed in German. Lurie’s memoir of his early days in Riga is also available but awaits the publication of two additional volumes of his later memoirs. There are also essays and poems that faithfully extend his anti-establishment NO! beyond the visual. 

Throughout their period of active production, both Lurie and the NO! art movement willfully put themselves outside of the art world and away from the commodification of art. Lurie was brazen in his disdain to the extent that in 1970 published an indictment of the famed ivory tower of modern art titled MoMA as Manipulator.  As an artist, myself, it is easy to understand Lurie’s frustration. From its inception, the Museum of Modern Art was myopic and white male dominated in regards to its power structure and its collection. The museum has just reopened after a major renovation and is finally making an admirable commitment towards diversity within their permanent collection displays.  As much as the established canon of modern art can be viewed as dogma the latest push for political correctness in and outside of MoMA, certainly risks its own curatorial pitfalls. Still as Lurie must have known, an artist who bites the hand that feeds, puts the long-term viability of their work at risk.

Luckily for Lurie, he and his father were always able to attract wealth starting in Latvia then after the liberation in Germany and finally in New York City.  By the time of his death in 2008, Lurie managed to amass a fortune in real estate and other investments. With little reputation towards his large artistic output, a self-sustaining foundation was formed to promote his unique vision.  Since the foundation’s inception, Lurie’s work has been ambitiously exhibited at international venues including in Cuba, Israel, Italy, Germany, Latvia, Poland, and the US.  

Besides the promotion of Lurie’s work and the dissemination of his message, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation has also lent support to exhibitions focused on the NO! Art movement whose more than a dozen participants included Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, and Aldo Tambellini. The foundation is also involved with charitable initiatives that include providing aid to Israeli soldiers and holocaust victims in need of wheelchairs and medical rehabilitation. The foundation has also funded two art libraries in Israel at the Dada Janco Museum and at the Tel Aviv Museum. These new repositories of learning will ensure that the message of Lurie and NO! Art will be remembered by future generations. 

Currently on view at Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art is a retrospective for the very well established Yoko Ono. This exhibition features her famous 1966 Ceiling Painting/Yes Paintingthat perhaps was the original catalyst for the Lennon/Ono peacenik lyric “all we are saying is give peace a chance”.   At the same time and around the corner at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Boris Lurie’s battle cry of NO! will be viewed by an audience mostly unfamiliar with the under-recognized artist. In his retrospective, ALTERED MAN: The Art of Boris Lurie, the people of Ukraine will get the opportunity to consider an important artist who loudly confronted the fascism, hypocrisy, and horror that he and many others experienced in the 20^thcentury. 

Boris Lurie current exhibitions:

November 15 – December 15, Altered Man: The Art of Boris Lurie, Odessa Fine Arts Museum, Odessa, Ukraine

January 23 - April 26, 2020. REDISCOVERING BORIS LURIE (1924–2008): The Artist who dared to say ‘No!’ , Center for Contemporary Political Art, Washington DC

June 25 - October 14, 2020,Boris Lurie Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile

(collaborating with the archives of the Museo de la Memoria, Santiago, Chile)

July 7 - Sept. 13, 2020, Boris Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia 

September 3, 2020 - October 29, 2020, Boris Lurie Retrospective, MUSEO BORGES, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Yoko Ono current exhibitions:

until November 24^thYoko Ono: The Sky is Always Clear, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art 

until December 31, YOKO ONO: INTERVENTIONS/2 at The Georgian House Museum, part of The Bristol Museum group 

Foto-Gestalt 2019

published in the February/March 2019 issue of Aufbau magazine

Medium in Crisis: Narcissus in the Pond

At the age of 17, photography provided me with a license to actively engage with the world in a revelatory manner previously unknown to me.  I was taking a summer course with noted photographer Larry Fink in Martha’s Vineyard and hungrily ate up every pronouncement explicated from this charismatic beatnik.  According to Fink, the medium was about experience and empathy, not about passive voyeurism. It was not about being a hunter and souvenir gatherer, but about the exchange and interplay between photographer and subject. The camera was a tool for learning and self-knowledge, however the photographs, once exposed, might result in more questions than answers. The camera’s revelatory power was that it could be used for discovery rather than the facile and propagandistic purpose of proving a point. From the photographic adventure, there was the possibility of bringing back something others might appreciate, but that was a bit beside the point. This philosophy was a paradigm shift that transformed the way I considered the art making process and put me on my life’s path. 

The almost spiritual nature of the medium’s potential as explained to me on that New England island in 1985 still seduces me and engages my picture making today. The years that followed, however, have radically changed the way that photography operates in the world. The journey that I have personally taken from student to practitioner to teacher has been colored by radical developments in both the culture and the technology of the medium.  The Digital Age has brought both wondrous benefits as well as disappointing transgressions to the art form, as well as to my personal practice. The idealistic vision of photography touted to me in my youth can still be found in the work of some contemporary artists, but overwhelmingly, the mainstream culture has moved away from this humanistic impulse and taken the medium into the void of narcissism.

Digital technology has been wondrous in the resulting democratization of the photographic medium.  Not only do more individuals have access to the art form of photography, but mobile cameras are now being used as a simple and useful tool by large numbers of the population. Like any man-made tool, however, its use depends on its user. Just like the pen, a shopping list, love poem, or declaration of war are all options. Commonplace in our current day-to-day experience of photography is the pervasive selfie. On the street, on the subway, in the elevator, I notice this impulse everywhere. A child of social media, the selfie can be seen as Narcissus not only looking at his reflection, but falling into the pool. Related to this repetitive capturing of the self is the monotonous recording of things and moments. Rather than heightening an experience and using the camera as a tool to go deeper, this activity usually appears to be performed as a stand-in for actual experience. Thinking more about the posting and bragging, the present moment is lost and the trophy is hollow. Food, concerts, clothes, and travel are all fodder for the self-reflexive posting obsessed.  

This past New Year’s Eve, for example, I found myself on a NYC rooftop with friends and strangers. Rain and fog skewered the midnight fireworks display. But despite this, the revelers that surrounded me held up their mobile devices to desperately try and document the barely visible light show located beyond a tall building that further blocked its full recognition. Behind me in the dark, two 30-somethings preened in various poses taking selfies to prove they were there. Holding up a panda umbrella at various angles and then a Champagne glass, smiles were mandatory.  

The selfie has become a bragging rite that often showcases the aspiration or attainment of fame or wealth. This mode of photography is quite different from the casual family snapshots or hobbyist photography prevalent decades ago with film photography. The snapshot modality for the most part was bearing witness with a certain casual intimacy. The selfie more often than not reflects vanity at a level never before captured in the visual culture. This type of photography is certainly a very far cry from the Socratic impulse still espoused by Larry Fink, a professor at Bard College. When I myself recently taught photography, I had to work against the students’ assumption that a selfie reflects the goal of portraiture. When teaching studio lighting, students initially camped the same preening poses used for the typical toothy selfies. My goal in teaching portraiture is to lead the students of today towards an appreciation that a true portrait goes beyond the superficial vanity and disposable value of the selfie.  

The monolithic intrusion of social media selfies upon the way we function and perceive reality is a result of a 20-year journey through a digital revolution. In 1991, I entered an MFA program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The then recently-launched graduate program in Photography and Related Media was founded by Charles Traub, who had the foresight to make digital photography a signature focus. As an educator, Traub was ahead of the curve; the programs at Yale and RISD were at that point still solely film based. Photoshop had only just been released in 1990 and I was part of the first generation to take a course on the software. After the class, however, I promptly rejected digital. Unlike some of my fellow students, who used the floppy disk based Sony Mavica cameras as well as Photoshop, I was decidedly Luddite. At least for the moment.

A decade later, in 2000, I found myself drawn back to Photoshop when producing the first of three limited edition artist’s books, in which I converted film negatives in order to output the images as digital pigment prints. I was using the technology to control the means of production and distribution.  I found that the technology actually gave me more control of image manipulation and printing quality than I had experienced in the traditional darkroom. In addition, I could use beautiful fine art paper for my images, which was not an option in traditional photography.  

I was still shooting film, however, and it wasn’t until 2004 that I started experimenting with my first digital DSLR camera.  I found the results lackluster, though, and continued to use film. Since starting assignment work for The New York Timesin 1992, my editorial work was focused on capturing famous individuals at A-list events. This work crosses the line between the commercial and fine-art spheres. It was due to this particular sensibility that editors still allowed me to shoot film well into the millennium, when most other photographers were shooting digitally. In fact, I was able to shoot film for my multi-page features of New York Fashion Week for Women’s Wear Daily’sprinted magazine The Collectionsthrough 2010.  

By then however, it was clear from the publishing landscape that I would need to shift if I wanted to stay viable as an editorial photographer. So I pitched my editor at WWDa digital version of my coverage. I would shoot digitally (using a new mirrorless camera that suited my needs) and upload multiple posts throughout fashion week while including a first person written account of my observations. He loved the idea and confided that my pitch was prescient, as the printed magazine was folding and everythingwas now to be online. 

Although this arrangement was highly successful and resulted in eight more seasons of work, it was for me the end of an era. I had come of age in a time when print magazines hired photographers to create dynamic visuals in a variety of styles. The publications could be superficial for sure, but they could also be highly engaging. W Magazinehad hired me for two years in the 1990s to create a series of pictorials satirizing the rich & famous. This was pretty subversive stuff from a publication that otherwise fawned on socialites and wealth. In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s magazine George, commissioned me to photograph President Bill Clinton’s run for his second term as President. The writer was Norman Mailer. The publication hired us even though neither of us were traditional political journalists. Other publications such as the New York Times Magazinecould be equally as progressive. Larry Fink recently referred to those days as a golden age for photographers, and I agree.

Although the 1990s provided stellar opportunities for subversives such as Fink and myself, the importance that publications held in the culture had actually been in steep decline for decades. The picture magazine had actually reached its zenith in the mid-20^thcentury. At that time publications such as Look, Life, and Harper’s Bazaarwere on the cutting edge of showcasing creative photography. In 1940, when fascism was taking hold of Europe, PM Weeklypublished a series of photographs depicting decadent bourgeoisie lounging in Nice, France. This seminal body of work was shot by Fink’s mentor, Austrian emigre Lisette Model. Later that decade, Lifemagazine published an eye-opening picture essay by Gordon Parks depicting a Harlem gang leader. The pictorials that were showcased in picture magazines brought a world on the brink into people’s living rooms. By the mid 1960’s television was bringing nightly coverage of the Vietnam War into people’s homes and the picture magazine became obsolete. In 1978, Life magazine went from a weekly to a monthly and currently only remains in special editions often dedicated to dead celebrities. 

The current celebrity-focused incarnation of this once legendary photojournalistic news magazine should, in another way, come as no surprise. From at least the 1950s through the digital era of today, fame seems to have grown exponentially as a cultural obsession. In the 1990s as digital photography was developing, so was a cultural construct of reality as captured for television. MTV’s Real World series launched in 1992 and ignited a society that not only watches The Kardashians, but wants desperately to have the same kind of fame that this family achieved through the weekly broadcasting of their vacuous reality. We need only look at the current American President to see the end game of our current obsession with fame and its depiction.

For me to lambast the current state of celebrity culture might seem a bit hypocritical. After all, I’ve made a career and an artistic body of work based on this phenomenon.  The fact, however, is that I made the pictures as a form of social commentary. My ambition has always been to try and elevate society by holding a mirror up to its decadent excesses. At the present moment, the opportunity to make such pictures for public consumption have all but disappeared. Those with fame exerted their growing power and insisted on release forms and other methods of control. Publications and journalists for the most part acquiesced. Editors in turn seem to want images that are easily digested by their audience. Flattering, toothy, front and center shots of the celebrity that are the equivalent in psychological depth to any selfie found on Instagram.  

Although today I rarely see images that interest or provoke me in mainstream publications, I often see pictures on social media that certainly cross the line. When studying with Larry Fink, it was explained that while we photographers were in fact invading someone else’s personal space with our cameras, if we were committed to utilize the art form for a higher purpose we could transcend any possible transgression. Although I can’t quite recall any conversations about respect for the subject and decorum, I feel like that would have been an obvious if unspoken expectation. Not so anymore, it seems. A few years ago, I noticed on Facebook a rather disturbing post by an acquaintance. She had used her phone to photograph an Amish couple who were sleeping on an Amtrak train. The image had no pathos but showed them, disheveled, mouths open and unaware. The litany of comments on the post were both for and against this particular documentation of reality. The acquaintance freely admitted to knowing full well that the Amish, as a rule, do not allow themselves to be photographed. Despite this she felt it was her right to lean behind her seat and take the picture. I found her way of thinking problematic at best and certainly a sign of the times. 

The medium at this moment is multi-faceted for sure and, as always, in flux. As a society we are still looking to balance the freedom of expression with the right for privacy. I still believe photography is an immensely powerful tool for Socratic investigation. Along those lines there is still some wonderful work being made by important voices. In 2010, Rosalind Solomon along with 11 other internationally acclaimed photographers, spent time making pictures in Israel and the West Bank for a project entitled This Place. Solomon spent 5 months photographing many individuals in many locations and of all faiths. Carrying her trusted Hasselblad camera on this new adventure, she “saw and felt…informed by the unexpected.” The resulting images published in her 2014 monograph THEM, tap into the psyche of her subjects. This octogenarian, who is another former student of Lisette Model, still to this day shoots her work in film. Larry Fink on the other hand, has gone digital. Acclaimed for his square medium format flash-infused dramatically lit images, he has put his flash away and embraced the incredible light sensitivity of the recent generation of digital camera sensors. Photography is dead…long live photography.