“Can you stand back a little?” That’s what the photographer Larry Fink
remembers Jerry Brown, the governor of California, asking him on a
Monday in December. Fink was at the capitol building in Sacramento to
photograph Brown for Connie Bruck’s Profile in this week’s magazine,
about the state of California’s war on Trump.
Fink had been invited to sit in on a meeting the governor was having
with a group of educators. “I see his shoulders, and his head, and his
hands gestating, and my immediate response—and this is without meeting
the governor—is to get in really tight,” Fink told me. The fact that a
government meeting was unfolding around Brown did not stop Fink from
moving in. “I don’t work into it,” he said. “I go right into it.”
Photograph by Larry Fink for The New Yorker
In the course of a fifty-plus-year career, Fink’s work has been
defined by a signature intimacy. Whether photographing New York City’s
social élite or folks living in rural Pennsylvania, the “delusionary revolutionaries” of the Beat Movement or loggers in the state of Washington, competitive boxers or Bernie
Sanders supporters, he has provided decidedly up-close accounts. The
subjects of Fink’s projects, which have been shown at a long list of
major museums and published in several acclaimed photography books, are
often pictured with limbs stretching into or out of the frame. His lens
slides up near chins and over shoulders in an uncompromising search for
the central drama in a given scene, a vantage around which the action
spins. (In recent years, Fink has transitioned to compact digital
cameras to allow him an even more nimble touch.)
Despite his veteran status, Fink still has nightmares a few days before
most of his assignments. Before photographing Brown, he said that he
dreamed of “sunbursts coming through the room,” exploding a chair in the
governor’s mansion. Fink’s tremendous expectations for his photographs,
the fuel for these jitters, are revealed in the vocabulary he uses to
discuss his work. He scoffs at the idea of essentializing his subjects
but still aims, as he put it, to “reach my hand inside the pulp of his
soul.”
When the governor asked Fink if he could stand back, Fink responded
plainly that he does not work that way. “In my younger days, needing a
job and needing work, and needing whatever I needed to be needy about, I
would be more obliged to be within the decorum of the norm,” he said.
Now he’s letting less get in the way of his process. With the same
boldness, he’ll occasionally break out a harmonica on set and play for
his subjects, though Brown was not treated to such a show.
Photograph by Larry Fink for The New Yorker
Instead, at a follow-up portrait session at the governor’s mansion, the
two men ended up talking about skin. Fink recently turned seventy-seven;
Brown, at seventy-nine, is the oldest man ever to serve as governor of
California. The governor, as Fink recalled, was again surprised by the
portrait process: “Wow, you really do get close.” Fink responded by
admitting to Brown, “Your skin is a magnet for me,” and the two bonded
over their concerns about complexion, aging, and the rest.
The photographer Jonno Rattman, who has known Fink ever since his
high-school librarian made the connection, was on set as an assistant.
Governor Brown, who has been working to resist the Trump Administration
on a number of issues, “was polite, but obviously has a lot on his mind,
a lot on his plate,” Rattman told me. “Larry is elliptical and so
inherently opposite.” Being at the shoot, he added, was like watching
“two elder statesman from different universes meeting.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
