| | | |  | | | Larry Fink
Peter Beard and Friends, East Hampton, 1976
23.3 x 23.3 cm (35.4 x 27.9 cm)
Vintage gelatin silver print | | | | | | Tough Cookie | | | | Early Prints from the Gerd Sander Collection | | | | August 31, 2024 – November 30, 2024 | | | Opening Friday August 30, 2024 6- 9pm
Opening Hours DC Open Weekend:
Saturday August 31, 1 – 7 pm
Sunday September 1, 1 – 5 pm | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | Larry Fink
Oslin's Graduation Party, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, 1977
38.5 x 38.3 cm (50.7 x 40.7 cm)
Vintage gelatin silver print | | | | | | The exhibition Larry Fink - Tough Cookie. Early Prints from the Gerd Sander Collection is a tribute to the American photographer, who died in November 2023 at the age of 82. The presentation focuses on his portrait series Social Graces, which brought the New York-born photographer international fame. Created in the 1970s, it was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and published in book form in 1984. The 1970s also saw the beginning of the photographer's collaboration with Gerd Sander, who was working as a gallerist in New York at the time. The vintage prints presented in the current exhibition are all from this early period of the two's friendly collaboration, which lasted several decades.
Formally, the Social Graces series of works is firstly captivating due to the visual power of its individual images: Framed in narrow frames, shot from unusual angles and using a handheld flash separate from the camera, the portrayed persons often appear isolated from their surroundings. Here, the photographer draws the viewer's attention mercilessly to small yet telling details - wrinkled hands, pursed lips, deep décolletés. The result is extremely condensed, emotionally charged images. However, the series unfolds its true, lasting effect through its conception: Fink juxtaposed his portraits of New York's wealthy upper class, which were taken in the city's hippest clubs at the time such as Studio 54, as well as at gallery openings and charity galas at MoMA or at debutante balls, with photographs of his neighbors in rural Martins Creek in Pennsylvania. Here, about 85 miles west of New York City, he and his wife had bought a farm in the meantime. The images of the Sabatine family's impoverished domesticity, taken at children's birthdays, graduation parties and other festivities, bear witness to their simple and deprived existence, but at the same time convey a - sometimes chaotic - liveliness and familial warmth that stands in stark contrast to the snobbery and cold extravagance of the perfectly styled, privileged Manhattanites. | | | | | |  | | | Larry Fink
New York Magazine X-mas Party, 1977
35.7 x 35.9 cm (50.4 x 40.4 cm)
Vintage gelatin silver print | | | | | | Larry Fink's strong sense of social justice was significantly influenced by his left-wing intellectual parents - his mother was an activist against nuclear power and later joined the Black Panthers. Another important mentor was the photographer Lisette Model, with whom Larry Fink received an - albeit brief - apprenticeship and whose socially critical images further sharpened his eye for social inequalities.
A clear social commentary on the issue of class, Social Graces arose from Fink's personal “rage against the privileged class – its abuses, voluptuous folds and unfulfilled lives”, as he writes in the foreword to his book. At the same time, however, he also emphasizes here that his photographs “were created in the spirit of empathy. Emotional, physical, sensual empathy. This work is political, not polemical.” And so, it is indeed not only the contrasts of existence at the high and low ends of society that he focused on. Across all classes, his images document the same joy, longing, loneliness and melancholy that is common to all people, whether in a fashionable uptown club or at a country boy's eighth birthday party.
Fink's work has been extensively published, among others in Vanity Fair, GQ, the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. He has also published numerous books during his six-decade career and has received many awards, including two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships (1976/1979) and most recently the International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2017). His photographs can be found in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. | | | | | |  | | | Larry Fink
Oslin's Graduation Party, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, 1977
38 x 38 cm (50.5 x 40.4 cm)
Vintage gelatin silver print | | | | | | A personal note from the gallerist Julian Sander
Larry Fink was an old friend. I met him in the late 1970s when he was having his breakthrough moment with Social Graces. My father, Gerd Sander started to represent Larry around this time. Larry was a student of Lisette Model, with whom my father had been working. Larry and my father, both photographers, developed a friendship that was rooted in their understanding of the photographic medium as a means of telling stories, as well as through their respective care and understanding of the mechanics of the photographic print.
Larry was a restless soul with a deep and passionate visual voice. He looked into unexpected places and captured the raw and the poetic therein. It was like he was improvising to the music of life with his camera, just like he would play his harmonica or any piano that was at hand. It is jazz, and he saw the music.
This exhibition consists of works primarily from Social Graces. It is the point at which Larry Fink became a household name among curators. The works are poignant, raw and truly unapologetic. He became one with the environment in which he photographed. He captured the moments when people were true and bound them to film. This is Larry Finks legacy. His is the bold and unflinching view into the joy and sorrow, the power and struggle, the deepest truest parts of humanity.
We look forward to welcoming you to our gallery for the opening and exhibition. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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