Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy

Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy Curated by Lucy Sante
24th May, 2025 – 31st August, 2025
CPW
25 Dederick Street
Kingston, NY 12401

An Intimate Survey of a Photographer Who Found Humanity in Glamour and Grit Alike

Larry Fink, whose camera offered an unflinching and deeply human view of American life across class and culture, is the subject of a new exhibition that explores the depth and duality of his six-decade career.

Titled Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy, the exhibition at the Centre for Photography at Woodstock surveys the breadth of Fink’s work—from the glitter of Manhattan’s elite to the quiet rituals of rural Pennsylvania. Curated by the writer and cultural critic Lucy Sante, the show features Fink’s most celebrated series, Social Graces, alongside rarely seen images from civil rights demonstrations and the smoky, close-knit world of 1960s jazz clubs.

Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Fink was introduced to photography by his father and won his first competition at the age of fourteen. He studied briefly at The New School, where he was mentored by photographer Lisette Model. Immersing himself in the city’s post-war bohemia, Fink photographed beat poets, painters and musicians, drawn in particular to the energy and improvisation of jazz—a sensibility that shaped his approach to photography.

Fink’s use of flash created stark, high-contrast images that captured spontaneous moments with dramatic force. Whether at Studio 54 or a backyard barbecue, his photographs revealed a consistent interest in gesture, vulnerability and the theatricality of social life. The work that became Social Graces, first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and published by Aperture in 1984, juxtaposed high-society events in Manhattan with gatherings in working-class Pennsylvania, revealing unexpected parallels in human behaviour across settings.

“All of those circumstances engaged his rapid eye, his almost painterly chiaroscuro, and his identification with the human beings he photographed, good, bad, or ugly,” Sante writes. The exhibition reflects this sensibility, capturing the range of Fink’s work—from black-tie galas to back-garden revelry—with equal measures of intimacy and clarity.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition are fragments of Fink’s own writing—reflections, poems and observations that deepen the portrait of an artist as attuned to emotion and presence as he was to form and light.

Jacob Hashimoto: Analog Death, etc.

For the amount of people that have more than likely seen this picture, and for the amount of bullets that were flying at them, one has to surmise that Jean Sabatine was a lousy shot, cause nobody fell down dead.
But this picture is alive.
Image courtesy of Larry Fink and CPW © Larry Fink

The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph, Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking, to be published by powerHouse Books in 2025.

Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy is presented in partnership with the MUUS Collection. A digital guide is available via Bloomberg Connects, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy Curated by Lucy Sante opens on the 24th of May, 2025 until the 31st of August, 2025 at CPW, New York

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