Larry Fink, Legendary American Photographer, Dies at 82
Larry Fink, the legendary American photographer best known for black-and-white images of America’s class and cultural divide, has died. He was 82.
Robert Mann Gallery, which represented Fink, confirmed his death on Saturday at his home in Pennsylvania, without giving a cause of death. Born in Brooklyn in 1941 and raised in New York City, Fink was privately taught and mentored in the East Village by Lisette Model, the Austrian-born American street photographer.
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Since the 1970s, Fink lived and worked on a rural farm in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania. In that rural setting, he met the Sabatine family, who often became subjects of his work.
His photography often revolved around family portraits, including birthday parties and graduations, while Fink also drove four hours back and forth to New York City to capture high society in Manhattan for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and GQ, among other publications.
“I wasn’t photographing for a career – I was photographing for the revolution,” Fink said in a 2021 magazine profile in Blind Magazine, as he recalled his growing up as a “Marxist from Long Island, with Bernard Fink, a lawyer, and Sylvia Caplan Fink, a civil rights activist, as his parents. “My mother was a communist. She was an organizer and she had no fear. She was a bourgeois also. She loved mink stoles,” Fink added of his contradictory upbringing that informed his photography.
That clash of social divides was captured in his breakout 1979 exhibition Social Graces at the Museum of Modern Art, which portrayed working class people in Martins Creek alongside the glitzy high society of New York City. His black-and-white images of Manhattan high society were often captured through the use of a hand-held flash separate from his camera that caused his subjects to appear isolated and adrift.
Fink had solo exhibitions in the U.S. at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as a host of showing at galleries and museums in Europe and elsewhere. He earned two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts, and other prestigious awards and achievements over his celebrated career.
Fink also taught photography at Bard College, Yale University School of Art, Cooper Union, Parsons School of Design and New York University.
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