"LARRY FINK" par Laurie DAHLBERG. Editions Phaidon, Londres – New York. 2005. in-8 carré, couverture cartonnée noire sous jaquette photo. Non paginé (124p). Texte en anglais de Laurie Dahlberg, illustré de 55 reproductions photographiques noir & blanc, hors texte, par Larry Fink.

 

"Larry Fink is an intuitively verbal person who can play off aphorisms like a jazz musician plays off flatted fifths. When the standard vocabulary fails, Fink spontaneously coins neologisms, words like 'intrinsicity' and 'instantaneality'. His improvisational statements and phrases are exuberant and sometimes argumentative, but always decisive and sincere. This might serve also as a good description of Fink's pictures. 'Never once have I explored formalism for its own sake,' he says, which he quickly explains as meaning that the emotional content - the human content - always drives the making of his pictures. That Fink also has the astonishing ability of a cardsharp to make the chance ingredients of the space-time moment come out just so in the two-dimensional world of the photographic print is necessarily visually compelling. But the formal qualities - the fantastic repetitions of shape and gesture, the slicing vectors of shadow and light that direct the eye to the small, pungent detail - are ultimately conscripted in service of the human element. Moreover, Fink will tell you that the virtuosity of his compositions has little to do with foresight, technical manipulation or practically any method of control on his part. Certainly forty years of experience in photography has made him a master of his cools, so much so that the technical operations are now so natural as to be invisible. But Fink insists that if he really relied fully on his knowledge and experience, the pictures would be failures - they would be too slick. Instead, he honours intuition, improvisation and chance…"

 

Ref LPB1084