Larry Fink

Larry Fink was an American photographer and educator whose black-and-white images created over 60 years captured the personal and social lives of America’s elite as well as the working class.

Born Laurence Bruce Fink in Brooklyn, NY, 1941, Fink’s father was a photography hobbyist with a Rolleiflex; in his early teens, Fink began experimenting with photography, and at age 14 won a contest for Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. His parents provided him a hyper-cultural childhood, exposing him to artists and musicians, and books by Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mother, a Marxist and activist, imbued his upbringing with conversations around leftist social concerns.

Fink briefly attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, followed by a similarly brief interlude at The New School for Social Research, where humanist photographer Lisette Model was teaching; she soon took him under her tutelage. During this period, Fink began living with Beat artists—musicians, poets, and painters—whom he voraciously photographed. The group often convened by the Village Gate, listening to players like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Art Blakeley, igniting Fink’s lifelong love of jazz.

In the early 1970’s, Fink began documenting the nightlife of wealthy Manhattanites, from Studio 54 to debutante balls. He later decamped to a farm in Pennsylvania, where he also began photographing his neighbors. In 1979, the resultant series Social Graces was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was later published as a monograph by Aperture in 1984. Featuring images of high society and rural community alike, the series serves as a monument to Fink’s capacity for empathy, and created a unique perspective of the lives of the gilded. Fink’s signature high contrast was achieved through his penchant for flash and its ability for dramatization, calling it “a tool of the intuition.”

Fink’s nightlife photography led Vanity Fair to commission him to photograph their annual Oscars afterparty, which he continued for almost a decade. In addition to his assignments for Vanity Fair, Fink photographed for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and GQ. He was also a lifelong educator, having begun taking teaching positions in the mid-1960s through the rest of his life at esteemed universities such as Yale University, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, New York University, and Bard College.

Fink was the recipient of numerous awards during his lifetime, including receiving a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship twice, once in 1976 and again in 1979. In 1986, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Photography Fellowship, and in 1999 he won an Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Magazine Photography. In 2015, Fink received the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Fine Art Photography, and in 2017, he won the Lucie Award for Documentary Photography.

His nearly 30 monographs include the seminal books Boxing, Runway, Social Graces, Forbidden Pictures, and The Beats. Fink passed away in 2023, mid-production on the book Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking, which was published posthumously in 2024. His work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Art Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris among other prestigious museums and collections.