LARRY FINK

Larry Fink
An introduction to the 40 year career of the American photographer.Laurie Dahlberg

Known as the 'Jack Kerouac of photography', this is the perfect introduction to the work of American photographer Larry Fink (b.1941)
The first and only book to assess the entirety of Fink's 40-year career as a photographer, during which he celebrated the expressiveness of the human body and its colourful, energetic sensuality
Fink's genius is shown chronologically through images that meld social commentary with exquisite pictorial composition
Picture-by-picture commentary text provides a fresh perspective on Fink's life and work, placing him in the context of his time and within the history of photography

Born in 1941, Larry Fink was a disaffected teenager in 1950s America on the cusp of radical social change. His career as a photographer began to flourish at art school. He spent the 1960s watching and learning from the prominent photographers of the time: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith. In many ways, his photographic aesthetic and rebellious spirit encapsulate the dramatic loss of innocence that the US underwent after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Through his mother, he met Lisette Model, who would become his photographic mentor. Fink's work draws heavily on the European tradition of photography of Brassaï and Kertesz and of the painters Georg Grosz and Otto Dix. Like these artists, Fink saught inspiration in what he considered a grotesque and sensuous theatre of life. Characteristic of his acutely perceptive outlook is the central subject of his imagery: the human body in action. Like Weegee before him, Fink was an interactive photographer, always ready witness to everyday drama.

Always keen to infuse his photographs with social commentary, Fink would pursue socially and politically contentious imagery for the rest of his life, such as in the Black Ties series and the Martin's Creek series. He currently teaches photography at Bard College in New York where he has been teaching since 1994. This monograph on Fink provides a fresh, elegantly produced introduction to one of the leading figures in photography today.
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