My Interview with Photographer Larry Fink in the October/November 2020 AUFBAU Magazine
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.
“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!”
"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."
“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!’ "
“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…”
“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. “
"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. "
"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."
posted by Miles Ladin @ October 13, 2020
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