From the bookshelf: Larry Fink, On Composition and Improvisation

Ian Wright ARPS

Without accompanying images, a photographic book review may be informative to a point – but the essence is missing. I’m therefore very grateful to Larry Fink for giving permission to include a selection of his images and to use direct quotations from On Composition and Improvisation (Aperture, 2014). This review has turned into a broader introduction to Larry Fink’s photographic work – a career stretching almost 60 years.

I suspect he is not as well known in the UK as he deserves to be – he was not in the RPS Documentary Group list of resources and books until I recently added references – and I hope this overview helps to correct that. He is an interesting, idiosyncratic, and engaging character – a teacher and thinker, a driven, emotional, and complicated individual, ‘pathologically curious’, an idealist who ‘once had hope but now has fortitude’. His brutal honesty about his own conflictions and contradictions is as clear as his undoubted talent, (evident even as an untutored 18 year-old) and his arresting, magnetic, images. The irony of the ultimate ‘outsider’ receiving photographic awards, and celebrity status, is not lost on the photographer himself.

Widely acclaimed in the twenty-first century, his photography divides opinion but I’m inclined to share one forthright reviewer’s opinion: ‘if you can’t appreciate Larry Fink’s photography, it would be best for all concerned if you sold your photography equipment and took up playing the piano ... The foundational mindset, the nugget of artistic spark, the compassion for all humanity, required to understand the true purpose of all this infernal shutter clicking is missing from your soul’.

I’ve tried to structure this article as a resource but mostly to let the photographer speak directly to the reader – the images are the essential starting point. Some biographical background provides context and selected extracts of Larry Fink’s text in On Composition and Improvisation give a flavour of his thought processes. Finally, some snippets from the most revealing interview I can find. Of course, this short article cannot do full justice to his body of work or his philosophy, but hopefully something will catch the reader’s attention to provoke further interest.

Gerry Badger (in The Pleasure of Good Photographs) asserts his belief that documentary is at the core of the photographic medium and ‘the source of its greatest potency’. He goes on to argue that ‘thereness’ is at the heart of the pleasure of good photographs: ‘The sense of a subject’s reality, a heightened sense of it’s physicality, etched sharply into the image. It is a sense that we are looking at the world directly… Such a feeling, such artlessness, when present in the photograph, can conceal the greatest photographic art… Those photographs that conjure up a compelling desire to touch the subject, to know the photographed person, display thereness. Thereness is a quality that has everything to do with reality and little to do with art, yet it is the essence of the art of photography’.

This central concept is at the heart of the documentary impulse and is the key to understanding the power of Larry Fink’s photography. What was said of Henri Cartier-Bresson – one of the influences Fink acknowledges – could also be said of Fink himself: ‘His recognition that untouched reality was already tractable enough, that the world was most intoxicating when served straight up’ (Richard Lacayo, Time, October 1987).

Fink’s photography epitomises the documentary approach. He gives us a central tenet: ‘Many photographers photograph so they can make a picture. They’re attracted by the structural nature of the image and the kind of hunt involved in picture-making. But for me, photography has always been a tool rather than an end in itself, a way of attempting to understand what it means to feel kinship with another – what … could be called empathy’.

As Paul Hill has eloquently put it: ‘Photography is about communicating ideas as well as information. The camera … makes a superb tool for exploring, observing, and representing both the external world and internal reactions to it. There are two areas of consciousness – the world of the imagination and the real world – and photography has the ability to combine the two’.

Image-making is a language of communication, freezing time, revealing realities hidden from the passing eye by framing these moments cut from a larger context, reducing the chaos of our experience, heightening our awareness. Or as Larry Fink puts it: ‘Time stopped deftly in a magnetic moment lives on and on… Pictures … remain fixed in the moment they were seized; their reading is as always ambiguous, subject to the changing perceptions and intuitions bred by delusion and experience’.

In On Composition and Improvisation, we have the benefit of a veteran (born 1941), and very active photographer and educator today, self-consciously reflecting on a lifetime of image-making. An observer of the human condition, powerfully underlining the autobiographical nature of documentary photography and the complexities and dilemmas of the process.

This high production-value, 123-page paperback book, has nearly 80 superbly reproduced and distinctive monochrome images from across his body of work, the earliest from 1958, the latest 2012, with selections from most of his published books (see below). The images are accompanied by short pieces of text in which he distils his experience, aspirations, and philosophy.

This is not a ‘how-to’ book in a technical sense, but it has something more important, the drip-drip of wisdom. Photography seen primarily as a tool to understanding; the definition and importance of empathy; photography’s ability to layer – offering multiple perceptions, bringing together incongruencies; the value of acquiring the building blocks of composition and familiarity with cultural references (such as his references to Caravaggio and Goya among others) which create templates in the mind; the concepts of an image having energy and atmosphere as charged space; the crucial role of small details and the here and there of a photographer’s positioning and viewpoint; the significance of chance and improvisation – responding to what is alive before you; the advice don’t get caught up in the perfect; an enlightening definition of an authentic voice; the influence of life outside the frame of a photographer’s images; and a recognition of the limits of photography. Some of these are expended in the Fink on Fink quotations that accompany this article.

In interview with Adriana Teresa (January 2011), he was asked what does everything that you have photographed mean to you today? He answered: ‘That I live with passion and that I care. The moment that we have is the only moment we will ever have, insofar as it is fleeting. Every breath counts. So does every moment and perception. It’s a way to be alive. I am involved with the idea of reaching deeply into the pulsing matter of what it means to be alive and being vulnerable and seeing if I can cast an emotional legacy about being human.’

The book doesn’t have a logical layout or neat headings and his language is often lyrical and romantic and rarely completely transparent – he resists the simplification of what is complex. In interview, his style is to give short cryptic responses. He can speak in riddles. Yet he can be direct and elegant in his brevity: ‘In the field of boxing, you have unbelievable purity of intention and innocence, and unbelievable greed, evil and belligerence, all sitting in the same stew pot. It’s a spicy stew. I like spicy stew’

I approached this book as I always do – as if I were having an open-minded dialogue with its author – combined with a virtual visit to a gallery of his images. There’s much to be gained if you give it the time and attention it deserves and follow up other sources of information and his publications. When circumstances allow me to resume my project on Rural Life in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Larry Fink will be whispering in my ear.

For me, his images fulfil his impossible goal ‘ to take a two-dimensional picture and make it something that a viewer enters and doesn’t want to leave. So that once they enter the universe of the picture, they become immersed in what it was like to be in this space and time, right then and right there’. But he recognises the limits, because photographs need a receptive audience and the majority of people ‘don’t experience pictures that way. We’re talking with the highest of ideals and hopes and ambitions and romance. Most folks are just trying to do their job and pick their kids up from school on time. Or they’re having fun and living their lives. They’re not immersing themselves in our pictures’.

So, why do we photograph? For commercial gain, the pursuit of prizes, badges, certificates, reputation? Or something inherently valuable – understanding, awareness, wisdom?

Some background (much in his own words). The core of Larry Fink’s images are observations on social culture – centrally, the city-based cultural elite and working class, rural life but also photo essays on boxing, loggers, the ‘Beat’ generation and the New York jazz scene.

Fink began his photographic career in the 1960s in New York as a young photojournalist working for several years for the ‘sophisticated women’s’ magazines and photographing in the streets of the city. Already, as an 18 year old, he had taken some remarkable images of the Beatnik community of Greenwich Village, only published in 2014. In the notes for the book which established his reputation, Social Graces (published 1984), he tells us that he was ‘hungry for immediate social change’ and (as a self-identified ‘Marxist from Brooklyn’) he viewed his participation as a ‘covert attempt to saturate the media with a deeper humanism’. Disillusioned with the mediocrity of commercial work, he gave up taking photographs for a year, started teaching photography (which he has done ever since) and played jazz for a living. In 1974 he began to photograph society benefits in New York, ‘fuelled by curiosity and rage against the privileged class’.

After six years of making ‘Black Tie’ photographs, he moved to an abandoned farm in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, down its own two-mile road up a hill through a valley. The newcomer from the city found himself in the middle of some old-time problems: wind and weather, erosion, flood, right-of-way. Every two weeks or so, he would get dressed up in a tuxedo and drive off to the city to photograph another benefit. At the same time, he was getting to know the people of Martins Creek, and ‘feeling less like a voyeur, more like a neighbour’.

In 1979, Fink had a solo exhibition of images from these two settings – the upper crust socialites at prestigious events in Manhattan and the working-class rural community in Pennsylvania. In 1984 this was published in book form as Social Graces with a second, revised large format edition in 1999. The New York Times reviewer wrote that the photos explored social class by comparing ‘two radically divergent worlds while accomplishing one of the things that straight photography does best: providing excruciatingly intimate glimpses of real people and their alltoo-fallibly-human lives’.

Fink’s body of published work has continued to widen over the 40 years since his Social Graces exhibition and in On Composition there are images from each of Fink’s body of documentary work in book form. Interestingly, many of the books are collections of Fink’s photography made years earlier.

Major publications include Boxing (1997); Runway (1999), a behind the scenes look at the world of fashion and couture; A Night at the Met (2009); The Vanities (2011), Vanity Fair parties 2000 to 2009; The Beats (2014), photographs taken in 1958 by the eighteen-year-old Fink, of members of the “Beatnik” Community as they travelled from Greenwich Village to Mexico and Houston.

Somewhere There’s Music (2006) collects Fink’s mostly unpublished black-andwhite jazz photographs from the 1950s to the late 1970s. In these photos Fink captures the cool heights of the Beat era and jazz legends like John Coltrane. Kindred Spirits (2014) photographs the Horvath family and farm; Fish and Wine (1997) is a booklet to accompany a 1997 exhibition. I’ve also included in this review some images from Opening the Sky, images from a 1980 project photographing the logging community of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State (published 2015).

In conversation with Larry, I asked if he could give me a couple of quotes or advice to aspiring photographers and gave him a couple of prompts, for example, what did he mean by his comment that photography for photography’s sake would do you no good? I should have known better. True to form I got a couple of classic “Finkisms”:

‘Life it seems is a never-ending stream of improbable events. If we don’t improvise within it, it overtakes us. Besides becoming static we become irrelevant, rendered to be dust and hair balls on the side of the road. It’s hard to pick up a camera if you are a hair ball. We are all blowing in the wind’.

And ‘to improvise is to be surprised by being alive’. A reminder that we can be too analytical, too concerned with a need to explain, to resolve contradictions, to say ‘this is about that’.

Wikipedia has a full list of publications. For extensive online galleries of his work see:

The International Center of Photography: www.icp.org

Artnet: www.artnet.com

www.larryfinkphotography.com

Photobooks have become extremely collectable in the last few years and this has affected the availability and price of books in the UK, especially when books go out of print. I bought On Composition at publication in 2014 for around £16 – current asking price on Amazon is over £30 in the UK (although still $20 in the USA) and the hardback of Social Graces I bought for £32 has become collectable at around £120 for a new copy (£60 for a second-hand copy in the UK and over $300 in the USA).

Ian Wright ARPS - iangwright@hotmail.com