I first became aware of Larry Fink, who died in , sometime in the s 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 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.
I kept it tacked up above my desk for years. Then, about a decade and a half later, I took a job at Bard College, part of the time in the photography department, and there I met Larry. Immediately, the picture snapped into focus. Not only was Larry capable of establishing trust with his subject, he was also capable of egging her on. Larry adjusted the emotional temperature in any room he entered. He was loose as a goose, humming with energy, bouncing on his feet, now and then pulling out his mouth harp and delivering a blast of Little Walter bent notes.
He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated that he had no need to prove it. He could loosen up his students—or if they were sufficiently stuck up, he could terrify them. To those students he might have seemed a bit like the lady in his photograph: jolly, entertaining, unpredictable, and possibly about to go off on them. His pictures had a you-are-there intensity.
Larry was patient enough to blend into the wallpaper as needed, but he resisted the presumption of invisibility and omniscience. His photos inscribed his own physical presence in the room. For him, they were life itself, even if they occurred in distant and hermetic social realms. Then in , he published The Beats. His friends included Amiri Baraka LeRoi Jones and Wavy Gravy Hugh Romney , neither depicted here, but the story the pictures tell is not about individual personalities.
