Night at the Museum: Museum of Natural History.

Larry Fink (1941–2023) was an American photographer and educator whose six-decade career produced one of the most penetrating and socially alert bodies of documentary work in the history of American photography — a sustained visual inquiry into the rituals, desires, and class divisions of American life rendered in high-contrast black-and-white images of startling immediacy and psychological depth. Born in Brooklyn in 1941 and mentored in the 1960s by the legendary Lisette Model, who encouraged him to pursue professional photography, Fink began his career documenting Greenwich Village's jazz scene and the world of the Beat poets before developing the flash-driven, oblique-angled, abruptly cropped visual style that became his signature — making him the ultimate outsider working on the inside, moving from the wild nights at Studio 54 in the 1970s to Vanity Fair's Oscar parties in the 2000s. His nearly thirty monographs include the seminal books Boxing, Runway, Social Graces, Forbidden Pictures, and The Beats, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships, the Lucie Award for Documentary Photography in 2017, and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Fine Art Photography, and taught for more than forty years, most recently as a tenured professor at Bard College.