Fink on Warhol collects photographs of Andy Warhol and his tribe taken within a time span of just four or five days in the spring of 1966 by Fink, working on assignment for the literary magazine East Side Review, alongside other photos of Warhol from this period. “The story was about Andy,” explained Shepard Sherbell, the magazine’s editor. “In 1966, everything was about Andy.” The East Side Review closed before Fink’s photographs ran; they are published here for the first time. “It was a larky shoot,” says Fink of the photos. “Spontaneous.”
Shooting Warhol, Ingrid Superstar, Lou Reed, John Cale, Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga on the Lower East Side, Fink shared the era’s attraction to the gang’s inimitable style and charisma. In the 50 intervening years, it never dawned on Fink that the photos had never been released. “I was high all the time back then,” he says. “And I wasn’t a careerist. So I didn’t think I needed to get them published. Then this year they turn up. And everybody goes: ‘Well, look at this shit.’”
Larry Fink (born 1941), a photographer with a penchant for intriguingly composed social tableaux, is best known for the now-legendary photobook Social Graces (published in 1984), which combined images from working-class Pennsylvania with a portfolio from upper-crust Manhattan. Also an influential teacher and mentor, Fink has influenced a generation of contemporary photographers in his teaching at the Yale University School of Art, Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, Parsons the New School for Design and Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He is currently Professor of Photography at Bard College.
Larry Fink secured enduring fame with the book Social Graces, which mixed images from working-class Pennsylvania with a portfolio from upper-crust Manhattan, observing manners and mores on the long, curvy couches of Studio 54 and in the chaos of Pat Sabatine's eighth birthday party, where the screen door is always just about to slam. Fink has always been interested in what high and low culture have to say to one another, and has continued to seek the best of both behind the scenes at fashion shows in Runway and in the ring with sparring fighters in Boxing.
Larry Fink: Somewhere There's Music