The big picture: Larry Fink’s New York state of mind

In 1999, the photographer Larry Fink orchestrated a fashion shoot in New York. The location was the celebrity hangout Elaine’s and the theme was Sweet Smell of Success, the 1957 movie about a gossip columnist, played by Burt Lancaster, exerting his power amid the shadowy whirl of midtown Manhattan. In Fink’s re-creation, socialites embrace, chatter and clutch champagne bottles, while at their centre , rising above it all, sits a man with the stature and hard stare to match Lancaster’s in the film: the prolific writer and editor George Plimpton.

Fink, who died in 2023 aged 82, was renowned for documenting the after-hours antics of America’s rich and famous, though he was just as comfortable mixing with inner-city boxers and subsistence farmers in rural Pennsylvania, where he lived. Never a photographer to fade into the background, or be dazzled by fame, Fink would jostle right into the action, often affecting it through his presence. “He consciously occupied as much space as his subjects,” writes the critic Lucy Sante, who has curated a new show of Fink’s work in upstate New York, “and that narrowed the emotional distance between them.”

For the Elaine’s shoot, Fink went one step further and engineered the whole hedonistic scene. “I would let everybody get inside the scenario, set up my lights, and then allow them to try to get drunk,” he told an interviewer in 2013. In particular, he egged on the man in the foreground, Jared Paul Stern, a gossip columnist for the New York Post at the time, seen here kissing the model Cameron Richardson on the neck. “I just kept goading him, and he kept on taking my advice in more and more profound ways,” Fink told another interviewer. “A very good picture emerged from his delirium with freedom.”