Larry Fink: Hands On/A Passionate Life of Looking

Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking is a 424-page encapsulation of Larry Fink’s master photos accompanied by insightful essays from Lucy Sante, Stephen Shore, Graydon and Ash Carter, Yolanda Cuomo, Martha Posner, and publisher Daniel Power. Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking offers an unprecedented overview of Fink’s career and his profound influence in the Lisette Model world (under whom he was mentored) on photography and on broader American culture.

Celebrated as a photographer of the people, Larry Fink is known for his impromptu, street-style black-and-white photographs that delve into societal complexities, class divides, and the essence of human connection. Throughout his career, which spanned from the 1950s to his passing in November 2023, Fink documented a broad spectrum of subjects, spanning from the glamorous scenes of Vanity Fair Oscar parties to the streets of impoverished Philadelphia neighborhoods. Throughout his life, he dedicated himself to authentically portraying the human experience across diverse communities.

Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking presents a comprehensive exploration of Fink’s remarkable career for the first time. Over his lifetime, Fink meticulously stored his images in boxes, where they often remained forgotten for months or even years. However, during the pandemic, Fink dedicated himself to combing through these boxes with the dream of creating a retrospective of his work: photographs and beat-style poetry. This endeavor gained momentum when Daniel Power, founder of powerHouse Books and a longtime collaborator of Fink, photographers Jonno Rattman and Jamie Cabreza, and art director Yolanda Cuomo joined Fink in his archival journey. They unearthed a trove of unseen treasures, resulting in a meticulously curated 424-page testament to Fink’s unparalleled creativity alongside his trademark jazz poetry.

Fink’s vast repertoire includes photographs of celebrities like Jay-Z and Meryl Streep, protesters marching down streets, and boxers in the ring (Including a look into his other books, Boxing (1998), Runway (2000), Social Graces (2001), Forbidden Pictures (2004), and The Beats (2014)). This book reaches even further by including non-human subjects like intimate portraits of insects in their natural habitat and dead animals grotesquely displayed. Larry Fink’s distinctive signature - his raw and experimental approach, his spontaneity, his interest in class commentary, and his intimate perspective - are presented in a manner unprecedented in his body of work, applied to subject matter viewers have rarely seen Fink tackle. Each image, painstakingly selected, offers a poignant insight into Fink’s unwavering commitment to his craft and insatiable curiosity about the world.

Larry Fink has had one man shows at The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Musée de la Photographie in Belgium, and the Musee de l’Elysee in Switzerland, amongst others. He shows in galleries regularly in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, France. Along with two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships in 1976 and 1979, and two National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Photography Fellowships in 1978 and 1986, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the College for Creative Studies, College of Art and Design, Detroit, 2002. A career educator, Larry Fink has been teaching for the last 25 years as a professor of photography at Bard College. Larry’s work has appeared in top publications such as Vanity Fair, W, GQ, Detour, New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and Fink has published numerous monographs including: Social Graces (Aperture, 1984; powerHouse, 2001), Boxing (powerHouse, 1997), Runway (powerHouse, 2000), The Forbidden Pictures (powerHouse, 2004), Larry Fink (Phaidon, 2005), Primal Elegance (Lodima Press, 2006), Somewhere There’s Music (Damiani Editore, 2006), Attraction and Desire: 50 Years in Photography (The Sheldon Art Galleries 2011), and The Vanities: Hollywood Parties 2000-2009 (Schirmer/Mosel 2011).

Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years teaching at Bard College.

Graydon Carter is a Canadian journalist who served as the editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 until 2017. He also co-founded, with Kurt Andersen and Tom Phillips, the satirical monthly magazine Spy in 1986. In 2019, he co-launched the weekly newsletter with Alessandra Stanley Air Mail.

Ash Carter is a writer and the Articles Editor at Air Mail. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Air Mail, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Medium, WIRED, Town & Country, USA Today, and more. He lives in Brooklyn.

Stephen Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore’s entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.

More than 25 books have been published of Stephen Shore’s photographs including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works; American Surfaces; Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph in Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series; Stephen Shore: Survey and most recently, Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 and Stephen Shore: Elements. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art published Stephen Shore in conjunction with their retrospective of his photographic career. Stephen also wrote The Nature of Photographs. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London and Berlin. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Yolanda Cuomo, graduated Cooper Union with a BFA. She currently resides in Weehawken, NJ. Cuomo is an experienced art director and avid educator. Cuomo works collaboratively with her clients and artist friends, which include, Richard Avedon, Paul Simon, Twyla Tharp, Laurie Anderson, Gilles Peress, and Sylvia Plachy to develop memorable and meaningful cultural and commercial projects. She has also worked with globally known publications and museums such as Aperture Magazine, Life Magazine, Food & Wine Magazine, and The Whitney Museum. Cuomo also teaches courses on design and book-making in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Daniel Power is the publisher of powerHouse Books, which he founded in 1995; its first duotone book printed in Italy was Larry Fink’s Boxing. It’s at that point that the rocketship left the launch pad.