Quotes by
Larry Fink

These were not models or abstract women wandering into my studio room but women who I have known as people and as real. To me photographing the nude is simply using my camera to sense and feel the pulse of life… I am interested in photographing of women as people, not the photographing of women as stigma, or the photographing of women as flesh or smut or form or any number of essentially superficial aesthetic devices in which the photographer’s fragile ego tends to dabble.

[Photography is] the idea of the transformative merger between you and the person you are seeing, that you somehow try to enter their form, their skin, their mass, their muscle, and potentially, possibly, their soul.

I photograph because I live. I want to contribute that passion of living to posterity in the best way I can.

My approach [to teaching photography] is to assemble an avenue for passions to be expressed. I want students to understand that there are no good pictures taken when your camera is pointed at subject matter you’re not interested in.

The moment that we have is the only moment we will ever have, insofar as it is fleeting. Every breath counts.

I’m a scoundrel, really. But there’s something about me that remains rather innocent when I’m looking at people… Also, I’m always slightly nervous when I’m taking a picture, though I do it obsessively and without shame. People may sense that and relax, or at least not feel threatened.

The pictures are taken in the spirit of finding myself in the other or finding the other in myself.

I’ve made a lot of fucking good pictures since I started.

The picture has to be part of a more fluid sense of process. It's just a photograph, after all. It can be discarded. You don't go to jail when you make a bad one. Don't worry about it so much. Work hard towards it, but don't think that if you fail, that this moment in your life is a ruination.

To photograph a nude without desiring her is the ultimate in perversity...

The pictures I take now and tomorrow and yesterday are about human events on a small order. I try to make them bigger, to make them into metaphors that might speak across the board.

My picture-making process is not so much about making a photograph as it is about paying extreme attention to what I’m most attracted to, what is drawing my interest. For the most part, I’m hyperstimulated at all times; my life is a massive run-on sentence of stimulation.

People like to have their pictures taken. Some will endure the pain of flash-blindness because recorded experience is somehow more important to them than actual experience. It is a profound aspect of our culture, this compulsion for proof.

Human honesty and deception have been the core of my work. I am drawn to energy that is both constrained and unbounded and I try with the camera to fix the complexity of the moment: to create an infectious perception, so as to change the viewers’ aloof judgment to one of unavoidable, impassioned involvement.

The photographs speak specifics, my words attempt to swallow a general flow.

I’m always aware of what’s holding my interest while I’m shooting, but I’m not analyzing my desires to the point of cooling things down—just to the point of understanding impulses as they come.

If you have talent, the only way to go about making really brilliant pictures is to give up the idea that each and every picture has to be a work of art in and of itself.