Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. When photographer Larry Fink died in 2023 at the age of 82, The New York Times called his work an exuberant document of the human condition. Fink was born in Brooklyn and raised by lefty parents on Long Island. Throughout his life, Larry brought along his camera and immersed himself in the lives of people from a wide variety of social classes and spaces, the second generation of New York beats, jazz musicians, working-class Americans, wealthy New York socialites, club-goers at Studio 54, boxers, and participants in the civil rights movement.

This summer, CPW, formerly known as the Center for Photography at Woodstock, has organized an exhibit of Larry Fink's work. The show is called "Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy." It's on view now at CPW's new space in Kingston through August 31st. A sample of Fink's photographs from the show is on our Instagram now at All Of It WNYC. I have with me writer Lucy Sante, who curated the show. Welcome, Lucy.

Lucy Sante: Hi.

Alison Stewart: When did you first become aware of Larry Fink?

Lucy Sante: I became aware of Larry Fink when I bought an oversized postcard at the St. Mark's Bookshop in, I think, 1985. I'd never heard of Larry Fink. The picture showed this large older woman aiming a pistol straight at the camera with her tongue parked in a corner of her mouth and a squint that becomes a wink against a violently floral wallpaper. I was just floored by this image, and I kept it tacked over my desk for years. Then, 15 years later, I started teaching at Bard College, and I met Larry. We were in the same department, photography.

Suddenly, that picture came to life because I could imagine the cronyism that was going on between Larry and his subject. Always, Larry just instantly made you into an accomplice, and hijinks would ensue, and you can see the whole evening. There's nothing violent about her aiming the pistol, which is, I'm sure, unloaded, but it's them just goofing off at a family party, these working-class rural people, small-time subsistence farmers in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, where Larry had a farm for many years until the end of his life.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's interesting you describing that picture because at first it's the amusement of it, it's the joy, a little bit of joy of her playing with this camera and playing with whoever's taking the picture. As you started to look at his work, you started thinking about curating his work, what changed for you about Larry Fink's work? What changed in your view of his work?

Lucy Sante: It expanded it. The fact is that the show that's now at CPW, which is spread out across this huge room, it was originally meant for a much tighter space, which was the Moose Foundation booth at Paris Photo last November. It has to be worked around a few alcoves and stuff like that. It was designed for that space. Because it's so concentrated, I wanted to focus on one aspect of Larry's work, which is really the predominant one, which was human social interaction, basically.

That said, while pondering this show, I was mournful of the fact that there's just no way I could include his heroic, posed against the sky, like heroic worker photographs of praying mantises. They're brilliant, but Larry had many facets. Larry was curious about everybody and everything.

Alison Stewart: When you have someone who is curious about everything and everyone, but you have to have a goal of the show, a focus of this show, what would you say is the focus of the show?

Lucy Sante: Again, it's human interaction, as shown especially at parties. He made a decision in 1970 to become a society photographer. Originally, his aim was he was very anti-establishment left wing, and he wanted to expose the ruling classes by taking pictures at museum balls and English-speaking union balls, and things like this. At the same time, he'd moved into this farm in eastern Pennsylvania. As he shot parties in these fancy spaces in New York City and family parties among these farmers in Pennsylvania, he was struck more by similarities and by differences.

He noticed that everybody goes through periods of infatuation, of intoxication, of sadness, of regret. The whole gamut of human emotions is present in both places. He was deeply-- he was very political. At root, he was a deeply human photographer. Nothing, as the saying goes, nothing human was alien to him. He continued doing that for the rest of his career. The later party shots for which he was famous were the shots of Vanity Fair's annual Oscars party, which he did every year for some 5 to 10 years. He also found and documented instances of community among boxers, fashion models, lumberjacks, all kinds of people.

He just, again, he was on the prowl. He was always looking for stuff. The boxer boxing pictures began as a single magazine assignment and spread out over like 20 years. He just kept going back to these gyms because he fell in love with them and with the people who worked in them.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. You said he was on the prowl.

Lucy Sante: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Did he always have his camera with him?

Lucy Sante: Yes, pretty much. When he was in work mode, he'd have, I think, two cameras around his neck, and he had a portable flash unit and dressed for battle. The interesting thing about Larry is that he was not a fly on the wall. He was in the room. That's a principle he learned from his great teacher, the Austrian expatriate Lisette Model, who also taught Diane Arbus, among other people, and that was that as a photographer, you can't pretend you're not there. You can't pretend that the picture was taken by God. You are in the room whether you like it or not, and you're casting a shadow, and you're jostling people who are jostling you back. Do you feel that in all of Larry's pictures?

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lucy Sante. She curated an exhibition of Larry Fink's photographs called "Sensual Empathy." It's on view at CPW in Kingston through August 31st. Larry was born in Brooklyn. He grew up on Long Island. Born in 1941. How would you describe his childhood as you understood it?

Lucy Sante: He was born in Brooklyn, but I think he was in the single digits when his parents moved to Nassau County, Long Island. His father was in insurance. They were very middle-class, upwardly mobile, the trajectory from Brooklyn to Nassau County, in fact. At the same time, they were very socially aware and connected to the arts. Larry's father wrote insurance policies for Raphael and Moses Sawyer, who became family friends.

One of Larry's earliest pictures is this remarkable mise en abyme of a young woman who is casting a very artistic pose next to her portrait by Raphael Sawyer. She's almost in the same pose as in the painting. When he needed a photo teacher, his mother arranged for Lisette Model to-- what's the word? Like the doctors, to do curb service, I'm going to say, to come to the house. Larry was not part of the classes she taught in Lower Manhattan, which were contentious and very competitive. Larry got private instruction.

Alison Stewart: Some of his earliest work was his immersion in the New York Beat scene.

Lucy Sante: Yes.

Alison Stewart: The artists and the people who made up that movement. What was interesting to him, to Larry Fink?

Lucy Sante: I deeply appreciate it. I identified with those photographs, which I think were published as a book not that long ago, maybe 15 years ago. I already knew Larry by that point, and a lot about him came into focus when I saw those pictures. For one thing, there were my tribe, now pretty much extinct, which is to say New York City, Bohemia, people living without money for the furtherance of their art. These, the people that Larry photographs are the second-generation Beats, the ones who didn't become mythology.

Although his friends included a few people who later became famous, none of the people who appear in the photographs left any particular mark, if you sense they're the ones who actually did go back to Nassau County and sell insurance. They're very moving. The aspiration, the idleness, the vacancy that can sometimes overcome people who've been eating less than the standard caloric intake for long enough. They're moving.

The thing is, it's a portrait of idleness. These people are never going to amount to anything. You can almost hear their parents' voices in the background. Larry himself knew exactly what he was going to do, and he was already doing it. That's the irony of the whole thing. Larry was turning in-- Larry, who I think did a week of college, I think, with that book. He was turning in his senior project, or maybe a graduate project even.

Alison Stewart: He loved jazz. He said, "Jazz players were my heroes. I idolized and was awed by them." What about jazz specifically moved him so much?

Lucy Sante: You've got to figure that he was alive and around at a watershed time for jazz in New York City. This was whole train was ascendant. Ornette Coleman had just arrived from the coast. Cecil Taylor was going to high places. This was extraordinary fertile moment. Also, on one of his first shy photographic outings as a nervous teenager venturing into clubs, Jimmy Rushing, the great blues shouter, Mr. Five by Five, was very friendly to him and repeatedly friendly over subsequent meetings. That gave Larry the encouragement to go on. He felt accepted, and he continued photographing jazz players well into the 21st century. Sometimes people he'd followed over decades, he continued photographing.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lucy Sante, who curated an exhibition of Larry Fink's photographs called "Sensual Empathy." It's on view at CPW in Kingston through August 31st. Studio 54. I say that, it makes me laugh. When you think about Larry Fink at Studio 54, what do you think about?

Lucy Sante: Oh, I think of Larry with this camera just being Larry, just moving around the room. That's what I think of. Although I was alive and going to clubs at that period, I never went there myself. I was strictly downtown and Arte Povera and all that stuff. It's a funny image, really, because Larry, okay, everybody has to picture Larry, who's still a beatnik. He's also a cowpoke. He's been countrified by living in this farm in Pennsylvania for all these years. He's wearing work boots and suspenders and got these cameras slung on him.

Everybody else is wearing glitter, and everybody else is shining. Larry is-- what's the opposite of shining? Larry is earth-toned. Larry is the real world. Larry is not cocaine flying spoons through the air.

Alison Stewart: One of the things you wrote about Larry in The New York Review of Books was this great line. It says, "Larry adjusted to the emotional temperature in any room he entered." How was he able to do that?

Lucy Sante: What I wrote was not he adjusted to the emotional temperature. He adjusted--

Alison Stewart: Adjusted the emotional temperature. Yes.

Lucy Sante: That's something I gleaned from being on senior project boards and things like that with Larry. I could see there were usually three-person boards, and Larry coming into the room was a squall coming into the room. He adjusted the temperature, he adjusted the light because he was just this burst of energy all the time. He was bouncing on his feet. Sometimes, to emphasize a point, he'd reach into the leather holder at his waist and whip out his harmonica and blow Little Walter. Unexpected in an academic setting.

Larry was not one to defer to decorum at all. He didn't care. He was going to be exuberant if he felt like being exuberant, and he often was. He could also scare the living daylights out of students because they weren't used to this pedagogical style being taught by this wild man who had very sharp judgments and could actually put people in their place if they needed to be put there. Although he was kind, but he was not restrained.

Alison Stewart: You included some of Larry's poetry on the walls. Why did you want to do that?

Lucy Sante: Oh, that was a mutual decision on the part of the Moose people and myself for one thing. I got to say that it was really interesting. This was news to me. We had to fight the people at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais for the right not to hang the pictures in a straight horizontal line, because they're Cartesians over there. Larry wasn't a straight horizontal line. The pictures had to bounce. They had to look like musical notes because Larry was always blowing a solo.

Likewise, his poetry is that post-Malarme. It's phrases and words strewn all over the page in this storm. You follow the shape of his thinking by looking at where the words go. We had a couple of examples of things that were both pertinent to his photography and also looked right. They look like the bouncing photographs.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibition is "Sensual Empathy." It's on view at CPW in Kingston through August 31st. It's Larry Fink's photography. My guest has been curator Lucy Sante. Thank you for making time, Lucy.

Lucy Sante: Oh, my pleasure. This is great.