Larry Fink, a kinetic photographer whose intimate black-and-white on-the-fly portraits of rural Pennsylvanians, Manhattan society figures, Hollywood royalty, boxers, musicians, fashion models and many others were both social commentary on class and privilege and an exuberant document of the human condition, died on Saturday at his home in Martins Creek, Pa.
The cause was complications of kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, the artist Martha Posner.
Mr. Fink was a Brooklyn-born lefty whose early work, in the late 1950s, chronicled the second-generation Beats who were his cohort in the East Village, where he lived for a time, along with the jazz musicians he adored (he played the harmonica) and the protagonists of the civil rights and antiwar movements.
But in the early 1970s he turned to overt social commentary, infiltrating the society benefits, debutante parties and watering holes of Manhattan’s privileged tribes and their hangers-on.
He was fueled, he once wrote, both by curiosity and by his own rage at the privileged class — “its abuses, voluptuous folds, and unfulfilled lives.”
Persons:
Larry Fink, Martha Posner, Fink, ”
Locations:
Manhattan, Martins Creek, Pa, Brooklyn, East