Lucy Sante’s essay A Human Among Humans from Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking published in The New York Review of Books along with a careful curated selection of images from the book.
“I first became aware of Larry Fink, who died in 2023, sometime in the 1980s when I bought an oversize postcard of one of his pictures. It showed one of his neighbors in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, a lady with a mischievous expression, her tongue lodged in a corner of her mouth, squinting over a revolver she is aiming straight at the camera. I didn’t intend to mail the postcard—in fact, I still have it. I was drawn by its comic danger, its ambiguity, its seeming to come out of nowhere. Who was the subject? Who was the photographer? What was their connection? There was something about the wallpaper behind her that suggested the gun might be loaded, I thought. I wanted to keep at hand that electric moment, possibly in the fourth or fifth hour of a well-lubricated party, when jollity might suddenly be tipping over into mayhem. Maybe what I wanted to keep was the photographer’s sangfroid, or maybe it was the apparent trust between artist and subject. I wasn’t sure, just that I felt a little more alive every time I looked at it. I kept it tacked up above my desk for years.”
Read more about the book HERE
Read the full piece HERE