Come Back Later When Your Work Isn’t So Human

Yael Friedman looks at a recent book, exhibition, and film on photographer Larry Fink.

By Yael FriedmanJuly 29, 2025

• Art & Architecture

PHOTOGRAPHER LARRY FINK, who died in 2023, used to say he wanted to break through the two-dimensional barrier of photography, stating, “It’s an impossibility but I try to do it anyway.” Few photographers, or any artists, have so successfully utilized the constraints of their medium to try and defy them. From his first, iconic monograph, Social Graces (1984)—where he embedded himself in debutante balls in New York, parties at Studio 54, and his neighbors’ lives in rural Pennsylvania—to his snapshots of celebs at Vanity Fair Oscar parties, Fink’s photos burst with physicality, rhythm, and almost overwhelming empathy.

His earliest works, produced as a roving 18-year-old Beat, captured his friends’ misadventures as they took their Greenwich Village jazz-and-drug-fueled reveries on the road to Mexico in 1958. In these, one can already see his sense for energetic improvisation, mise-en-scène, and communion with his subjects and their context. Music and musicians served as a compass for him over the course of his career, including portraits of jazz greats, such as John Coltrane, and anonymous moments from jam sessions in lofts and basements in New York. His city and its streets also made for one of his favorite canvases, as did London and Rome. As a young radical, he always kept his eye on the civil rights and anti-war movements, their energy and strife more than mere themes: he was never a neutral observer of any of it. As Max Kozloff wrote in the essay that accompanied Social Graces, “Fink regarded himself—because he had given himself no other choice—as a photographer working with people rather than as someone linked by a career to a professional community.” He tried working for agencies and magazines but ultimately understood that his sensibility lay outside editorial missions. According to Fink, “[T]hey said come back later when your work isn’t so human.” In teaching, he found another way to express and reinforce this preternatural ability to care and connect, mentoring and inspiring generations of students at Cooper Union, Yale, and Bard College, where he worked from 1988 to 2017.

This past year, several new projects—all begun while he was still alive but completed posthumously—further reveal aspects of Fink we had not seen before. A monumental book, a beautiful short film, and his first joint exhibition with his wife, artist Martha Posner, provide a richer portrait of him as a person and unveil new facets of his work as an artist. We can now (almost) fully see how he managed the near-impossible.

Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking, a doorstop at just over 400 pages, is the first publication to survey Fink’s career. It brings together previously unpublished images with selections from his nearly 30 monographs, including The Beats (2014), Boxing (1997), The Forbidden Pictures (2004), Fink on Warhol: New York Photographs of the 1960s (2017), and The Vanities: Hollywood Parties 2000–2009 (2011). Fink began working on it a few years ago, culling from more than six decades of images, even as his prolific picture-taking continued unabated and his work kept evolving. As Posner told me, “With most artists, their best work is behind them, and Larry continued to do great work. He was still taking some of his best photos.”

The new book has a wonderful essay by Lucy Sante titled “A Human Among Humans.” It captures some of the most essential qualities about Fink, a photographer so singularly present in his own photos and so deeply attuned to the natural choreography of life. “Larry clearly didn’t see social events as a disposable theme,” Sante writes. “For him, they were life itself, even if they occurred in distant and hermetic social realms.” She describes his dynamic subjectivity perfectly: “Larry adjusted the emotional temperature in any room he entered. He was loose as a goose, humming with energy, bouncing on his feet, now and then pulling out his mouth harp and delivering a blast of Little Walter bent notes.”

A red diaper baby born in the New York City suburbs in 1941, Fink was steeped in his parents’ political commitments and approached the world as an avowed radical. (Stopping with the family at a roadside diner, his mother would let Fink and his sister delight in the menu and in placing their orders. Then she would promptly ask the waitress whether the diner was segregated, and if it was, she would get up and walk her family out.) His parents prioritized culture as much as politics and steered their son’s rebellious streak toward his clear talent with the camera. In his teens, Fink discovered the Beats and their romantic disavowal of the status quo. As he wrote in Social Graces, “With my belligerence fortified by poetry, filled with a new sense of freedom to explore my relationship to the life before me, I photographed constantly.”

Fink remained politically engaged but in the most humanistic sense. Empathy, rather than abstract principles, ultimately guided his sense of justice. He set out to become a photojournalist who could upend the system, and he bore witness to some of the most brutal and inspiring scenes that unfolded in the 1960s and after. He photographed the 1967 March on the Pentagon, Coretta Scott King at the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, and the anti-Vietnam protest in New York in 1965. Even when he sought to deploy his images in the service of a cause, his sense of curiosity was always there. His gorgeous photo of King captures her sitting inside a rain-covered car, door open, peering up apprehensively at a man standing over and looking back at her, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, his outstretched arm on the car door. It’s unclear whether he is there to support or to voice anger and indignation, to keep her in or to help her out: it is intimate and inchoate. The body of the car and this drama between the two take up almost the entire frame, with the upper register containing the enormous crowd behind them, a separate scene unfolding at a different pace with a different storyline.

Not long after returning from Mexico in the late 1950s, Fink studied with Austrian photographer Lisette Model, whose ethos of “sensual empathy”—the photographer as a “human among humans” rather than a detached passerby—helped hone his natural instincts. As one pores over Hands On / A Passionate Life, it is striking how, whether the subjects are socialites or rural matrons, protesters, policemen, cultural icons, boxers, or loggers, Fink’s gaze is never judgmental, never pitiful or satirical. It barely registers as a “gaze” at all, despite his interrogation of class and emphasis on social contrasts. He may have longed to forge a path like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and work in the service of progress. But where the work of the WPA photographers has an almost anthropological gaze, he could never maintain that kind of distance. His mind was too quickly attuned to the individuals; his photos insist on shared experience. The mise-en-scène includes him even if he is out of frame—though sometimes he’s right there. In one of his most iconic and playful images, George Plimpton and Devotees, Elaine’s, New York City, January 1999, not only is Fink reflected in the mirror, but Plimpton is also looking straight at him, clearly annoyed, dead center amid a swirl of beauty, glamour, and late-night revelry.

Looking at so many of his photographs next to one another, from his street photography to his political work, one is struck that Fink bent the entire meaning of bearing witness to enclosed social gatherings. We are accustomed to connecting him to the dynamics of sealed-off dramas, like the private parties of Social Graces. Yet some of his most private studies are moments in the open. A photo of a man and a woman on a Tube station platform in an intensely personal embrace is a cocoon of intimacy in a public space. They take up most of the frame and are impossibly close to us—we can see the texture of the fabrics of their clothing, the ring on his finger as his hand presses against the wall behind her; we see her wry smile as she takes him in. Like the photo of King, it’s a moment so intimate and so palpable, even in the most public setting.

The book also enables us to see how Fink redefined portraiture. As the photographer Tim Carpenter wrote in his seminal essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2023), “The primary challenge of portrait photographs [is that] people are just too damned fascinating on their own; way more often than not, the presence of a human being overwhelms the picture.” Those immortalized by Fink do not hijack the picture with their star power, their glamour, or their grit. Fink’s magic is his ability to make us complicit in the scene unfolding within the frame, enlisting us in his campaign to celebrate and democratize his subjects.

Fink’s poetry is included in this museum you can hold in your hands. He very much wanted the book to be multidimensional. The Beat-inspired poems punctuate the rhythms of the images. Long, rhyming, stream of consciousness, they are dead serious and mischievous in equal measure. You can feel Fink at your heels as you turn each page.

              my beliefs are past tense

       what the present brings is hence

              enter the story of promises

¤

Lisa Schiller’s short film Fink (2024) vibrates with her subject’s tempo. Beginning in 2020, Schiller spent several years visiting Fink on his farm in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, which he bought in the 1970s with his first wife, artist Joan Snyder, and where his only child, Molly, spent her formative years. Originally seeking him out for a quote for another project, Schiller was quickly transfixed by his boundless energy and curiosity. We hear him at the outset impishly asking, “Who the fuck is Larry Fink?”

When I asked her how she decided on the arc of the movie, Schiller said she wanted the viewer to feel what it was like to spend time with him, and repeated what he told her: “Schiller, I’m not a hit-and-run kind of guy.” The film has some brief interludes that reflect on his long career through images, archival footage, or interviews, but for the most part we are with the man himself. He’s never still for long, body and mind roving—walking on his farm, around the rooms in house and studio; playing piano, saxophone, drums; mulling photographs at his dining room table; chatting and pontificating throughout. Fink, who taught for decades, comes across as a natural mentor and interlocutor in his discussions of art, politics, and human relationships. Subjects organically bleed into each other—Andy Warhol versus John Coltrane (you can guess which he had more reverence for and which one he called a “white pimp”), his evolution as a photographer, his earlier idealism and latter-day cynicism about people and America. Even in the more serious moments, with Fink unfailingly aware of his age and stage in life, we see his unabated need and ability to engage. He smiles and describes himself as a frog who jumps from pond to pond.

Schiller succeeds in showing how Fink’s lens was a reciprocal one, how he made himself present in the photos he took and integrated himself into all the worlds he depicted. His energy, likewise, is acutely attuned to whomever he is talking to, and we remain conscious of Schiller and her crew even when they are out of frame. Schiller ends up embedded in Fink’s world, their chemistry dissolving the membrane between artist and subject, exactly as Fink had always done himself.

Along with Fink’s conversational patter, Schiller captures the light and texture of the farm and Fink and Posner’s chemistry and complementary sensibilities. It becomes obvious just how much Fink’s life and work are not a solo project. Both he and Posner are fearless and honest interrogators, with an innate and earnest sense of urgency driving them, not merely alongside each other, but very much together. As Schiller tells me, “They are both willing to build it up and burn it down and they managed to find beauty in both.”

¤

Larry Fink / Martha Posner: Flesh and Bone, a joint exhibit at the Sarasota Art Museum (SAM) that ran from last November through mid-April, placed their respective sensibilities in dialogue with one another. A good curator could make a convincing case for showing these two artists together. A great one, like Peter Barberie, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, working with Virginia Shearer and Lacie Barbour from SAM, makes it seem obvious and inevitable. An enormous show with over 150 works, Flesh and Bone highlighted the profound similarities between Posner’s and Fink’s seemingly very different practices, enabling one to see their respective work anew. This exhibit shows Fink and Posner as peers, and how both are highly intuitive and imbue their work with their physical presence.

Posner is a sculptor and painter, often exploring how myths have portrayed women and how magic and trauma reveal themselves in intensely embodied ways. She usually works as if possessed, giving herself over entirely to her new creations. The farm has been her studio, her source of inspiration, and her store of materials.

Originally planning the installation as a Fink retrospective, the curators, much to Posner’s surprise, asked whether they would be interested in a joint exhibit. Despite her own fierce determination, Posner was used to giving Fink the spotlight. An introvert, she mostly did not mind allowing him to bask in the attention he sought and attracted. He supported her and was happy for her even if he sometimes should have ceded the floor. Posner tells me, “He made art possible for me and was incredibly generous, [but] he just couldn’t take any kind of competition. Thank God I wasn’t a photographer; I don’t think we would have been able to be together.” She played a critical role in his work, helping envision projects, serving as his best critic, and ensuring the completion of these three projects that will undoubtedly help shape his legacy. Posner is not present to merely better understand Fink, yet with her we do see him more fully. Conversely, Fink’s presence in the exhibition, far from overshadowing Posner’s work, provided a rich context with which to encounter it. Posner knew early on that she was an artist, and she took art classes as a kid in Cleveland. She went to the now-closed Philadelphia College of Art, but it did not serve her talent. One professor told her she was in the wrong place for an “MRS” degree. She dropped out two years in and wanted to get everything out of her head that she’d learned, even ceasing to paint for the next two decades. She moved back to Cleveland, got a studio, and started making sculptures and fetishes that felt like “magical objects in [her] brain.”

Inclined toward the marvelous and mythological, Posner sought to create things that somehow transcended their materials, like Greek icons or shamanic tools, always asking, “Why are the objects more than they are?” After discovering Mexican masks at a store in Cleveland, she traveled to Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Chiapas throughout the 1980s and ’90s. She met shamans and shape-shifters and curanderas (female folk healers). She’s always insisted that “none of this was metaphor for [her].”

Posner’s most powerful pieces in the show exemplify these properties: mythical figures at once supernatural and viscerally human. A pair of slightly larger than life-size sculptures, Memory of Flight III and Memory of Flight IV (both 2010), sat at the center of the main gallery, surrounded by Fink’s photos. Made of fencing, fabric, beeswax, found objects, synthetic hair, and Posner’s hair, these headless bodies are as beautiful as they are grotesque. In flesh tones, covered with hair, they are neither man nor beast and appear to be enduring a painful transformation into one or the other. Posner explains that the Memory of Flight sculptures take much of their inspiration from the metamorphoses of fairy tales and the role of women within them—cast aside, abused and unseen, or just meant to be saved. At art school in the 1970s, the strident feminism of the era did not resonate with Posner, yet her work is unflinchingly feminist.

Also on view was work from Posner’s 2017 Brutal Beauty project, made in response to the Me Too movement. Posner recalls that the Harvey Weinstein revelations and everything that followed profoundly impacted her and she didn’t know what to do with her emotions. She had been creating sculptures from empty garments for so long and soon understood they could help her channel herself. On the interiors of three red coats and the exteriors of 13 slips, all things worn close but hidden, she inscribed the words “me too” over and over, imbuing them with new properties born of personal and collective trauma—the kind of transmutation that recurs in Posner’s art, but set in a new register.

Throughout the exhibit, one found Fink’s and Posner’s work echoing one another or responding in direct dialogue. This was especially true in their respective senses of tactility. The photos that best exhibit Fink’s eye for fabric and the bodies inside it are placed around the Memory of Flight sculptures. The two artists draw each other out, each imbuing the other’s work with new qualities.

The exhibit dedicated one gallery to the work inspired by their shared life on the farm. It included Posner’s watercolors of animals and Fink’s photos of the beauty and brutality of the rural. The most striking images, reigning over the rest, were two that Fink took of Posner, which seem drawn from a feral and feminist fairy tale. In Martha with Coat of My Lost Happiness (1997) and Martha with Heart Sculpture (1998), Posner is framed by a landscape she clearly knows intimately and where she has worked her fingers to the bone, collecting wood and creating figures that may or may not come to life.

¤

Featured image: Larry Fink. London, England, September 1968, 1968. ©Larry Fink / MUUS Collection. Image has been cropped.