Larry Fink on Assignment

By Will Green

MUUS Collection’s Archive Manager, Green holds a PhD in Art History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and is the curator of several exhibitions, including Carl Chiarenza: Journey into the Unknown (2021).

Housed in Larry Fink’s archive at MUUS Collection are dozens of Polaroids and Fuji instant prints that depict the photographer on assignment for magazines. They capture him in a wide range of situations: mischievously threatening to spray a male assistant with fine perfume at Saks Fifth Avenue, enjoying a cup of tea and pastries while surrounded by a gaggle of teenage girls, or stoically looking on from the deck of a commercial fishing boat as if he were the vessel’s captain. Regardless of the setting or circumstance, Fink always appears to be enjoying himself. Yet such assignments were more than just a good time for the photographer. The popular press was a central aspect of Fink’s career, as it was for many photographers of the twentieth century. Although best known for the images of black-tie galas and working-class get-togethers that comprise his series Social Graces, Fink also made compelling photographs of the worlds of entertainment, fashion, food, health, music, politics, and sports—typically on assignment for magazines. Tracing Fink’s decades of publication takes us beyond the renown of Social Graces to reveal a broad and prolific engagement with American culture.

Magazine assignments fulfilled many functions during Fink’s decades-long career. A skilled portraitist with a keen attention to the mannerisms, facial expressions, and subtle gestures of his subjects, Fink used assignments to hone his craft and feed his voracious appetite for new photographic encounters and experiences. Several assignments captured his fascination and evolved into long-term projects. Magazines also provided a mass audience, practical support, and employment, the latter of which he steadily pursued around his position as Professor of Photography at Bard College and other schools. 

Fink’s entrance into the world of magazine publishing came through a chance encounter with Father John P. Hourihan, a priest whom he met while volunteering at the Lexington School for the Deaf in 1960. At the time, Fink was a fledgling nineteen-year-old. He was on federal probation for drug smuggling charges incurred two years earlier, had dropped out of college the previous year, and was trying to find his way as a photographer. Sensing promise in the wayward juvenile, Father John hired Fink to photograph his daily activities for an article that ran in the progressive Catholic magazine Jubilee. The article led Fink to Three Lions Inc., a Manhattan-based photo agency which provided him with more assignments, many of them for Catholic magazines. “I worked in the first part of my life, five years, I guess, for Catholic magazines,” Fink recalled in a 2023 oral history interview with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, “which is funny because I was a godless, heathen, pot-smoking, Antichrist kind of a dude.” An odd match for such assignments, Fink spent much of the early 1960s working on stories related to modern-day Catholicism, such as a photo essay on worshippers at an airport chapel, while also photographing jazz musicians and other subjects of personal interest in his spare time.

By the mid-1960s, Fink had moved beyond the purview of Catholic publications and into current events and politics. He gained representation from Nancy Palmer, a photo agent with connections to major publications, and also pitched stories independently. In 1965, he made his first and only foray into combat photography, traveling to the Dominican Republic to photograph the country’s civil war for the leftist magazine World Outlook. More often, however, assignments kept him in the New York City area, where he photographed Pope Paul VI’s historic 1965 visit to the city (the first time a Pope had visited the Western Hemisphere) for Paris Match, Andy Warhol and his entourage for East Side Review in 1966, and Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Madison Square Garden for the Saturday Evening Post in 1968. When student protests broke out at Columbia University over the school’s ties to the Vietnam War, Fink was on the ground with his camera. His photograph of a demonstrator conversing with a police officer ran on the cover of The New York Times Magazine on May 19, 1968, and another of his photographs of the protests was included in a montage on the cover of Time magazine the following year. Working both freelance and on assignment, Fink made documentary photographs that developed his ability to adapt to his surroundings and work in a range of circumstances.

But with an independent and headstrong personality, Fink struggled to relinquish authorial control and submit to the workflows of the publishing industry, which included editors, graphic designers, and others who had input over the final publication. “The reason that those days were somewhat of a burnout was because it was such a double and triple and quadruple criteria,” he recalled in a 1987 interview, “because you didn’t know which [photograph] was good because you were pleasing the media and then pleasing yourself, and all of it got interlocked and mixed together.” His frustration came to a head in a text published around 1969 in Harpur Review, a student publication, in which he lamented the “cutthroating of the caged animals of the trade” and announced his plan to focus on teaching. He further distanced himself from the media industry when he and painter Joan Snyder purchased a farm in rural Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, several years later. There, Fink worked on his own photographic projects, free from the dictates of magazine editors. He began creating penetrating, close-up photographs of attendees of exclusive events for the wealthy, as well as the parties of his new, working-class neighbors, eventually pairing the images to create the series Social Graces. The work earned him several prestigious fellowships, was exhibited in a one-person show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1979, published as a monograph by Aperture in 1984, and elevated his reputation within the overlapping fields of fine art photography and magazine publishing.

By the mid-1980s, following the success of Social Graces and the dissolution of his marriage to Snyder, Fink returned to magazine work after finding himself in an artistic rut and in need of new sources of income. In a 2010 interview, he looked back on this transitional period of his career:

“It was clear I had to get back to work. By that time I had become somebody, I had been shown in museums, I had the Social Graces book out and all of a sudden, kids that were coming out of photography schools were calling me up because they were the picture editors and the art directors of various magazines around town. They would come to me deferentially, saying, ‘Will you work?’ Yeah, I’ll work!! So lo and behold, here I am running around, helter-skeltering and working quite a bit. … So it was really a fluke, a good luck fluke.”

During this time, Fink worked for Vue, the fashion supplement of The Village Voice, for which he photographed several notable stories on New York nightlife and fashion, as well as for Esquire, Savvy, and Manhattan, inc. Kathleen Klech, an editor at the latter publication, gave him a breakthrough assignment in 1986, when she hired him to photograph boxing manager Jimmy Jacobs in the leadup to the first nationally-televised fight of his young protégé, Mike Tyson. A lapsed fan of the sport, Fink felt rejuvenated by the assignment and went on to photograph boxing gyms in and around Philadelphia for the next decade as a personal project. The work was shown in a one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997 and compiled into his second photobook, Boxing, the same year.

Magazine assignments provided Fink access to the exclusive worlds of fashion and celebrity, both of which also evolved into major projects. An important client was W, which in 1993 relaunched in an updated, large format under the creative direction of Dennis Freedman, who regularly hired leading photographers not commonly associated with fashion, such as Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Fink. Appearing in the June 1996 issue, “Show People” captured the drama (“theatre without a plot,” as Fink liked to call it) of New York Fashion Week with behind-the-scenes photographs of runway presentations for Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, and Alexander McQueen, as well as the hustle and bustle of the models, stylists, press, and audiences that contributed to the spectacle. Fink‘s access to the rich and famous expanded further in 2000, when Graydon Carter, then editor of Vanity Fair, hired him to photograph the magazine’s annual Academy Awards afterparty. Fink happily accepted, and he ended up attending the event nearly every year for a decade to capture Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, and other Hollywood A-listers drinking, schmoozing, and attempting to maintain the veneer of glamour that got them there. Fink’s photographs of fashion and celebrity are today among his most celebrated bodies of work and comprise his photobooks Runway (2000) and The Vanities (2011). 

Outside of the worlds of glamour, Fink was frequently hired by leading news magazines to photograph stories on American politics, a subject in which he maintained a deep, lifelong interest. A notable assignment came in 1994 from The New York Times Magazine photo editor Kathy Ryan, who commissioned him to photograph the annual Road to Victory conference of the Christian Coalition, a right-wing group whose influence within the Republican Party was rapidly growing under the directorship of 33-year-old Ralph Reed. During the event, one of Fink’s film magazines malfunctioned, which caused several rolls of film to be double-exposed. After the photographs affected by the technical error were cut from The Times’s edit, the progressive magazine Mother Jones published four in a two-page portfolio accompanied by commentary by writer Michelle Cottle, who mused over whether they might be “a divine manifestation of the religious right’s duplicity.” Fink continued to photograph the country’s ever-shifting political landscape. His photographs of the 2008 presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for Vanity Fair focused not only on the politicians themselves, but also on the media apparatuses that created and maintained their public images, the citizens whose votes they were attempting to secure, and the exhausting drudgery of campaigning. Although never compiled into a photobook or major exhibition, Fink’s political work is another substantial component of his oeuvre that was largely created while on assignment for magazines.

Some magazine assignments led to long-term projects, but most lasted only a few days, which staved off boredom and kept Fink sharp. “One day you might be photographing this beautiful gal and a crystal ball, and the next day, you might be photographing taxicabs with flat tires,” he joked in 2023. “Every next day is an open sesame for experience, from that to that.” Whether photographing musicians glibly serenading diners at a Manhattan restaurant for Gourmet, National Hockey League prospects attempting to impress stolid professional scouts at a pre-draft combine for ESPN The Magazine, or the daily heroics of emergency room doctors at Bellevue Hospital for The New York Times Magazine, Fink expertly captured the humanity at the heart of each story. He accepted such diverse assignments throughout his career, gradually accruing a vast and heterogenous archive of American culture. In 2023, at age eighty-two, he photographed families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who cared for their elderly relatives for The New York Times. The resulting photographs demonstrate Fink’s sensitivity to the vulnerability and fragility of old age, a condition with which he was becoming personally familiar. The story marked one of his final publications prior to his death later that year, on November 25, 2023.