Social Graces by Larry Fink, made principally from 1974 to 1982 in Manhattan and rural eastern Pennsylvania, pairs black-tie society events with working-class family and community gatherings. Fink began photographing elite benefits, balls, gallery openings, and nightclubs out of an interest in power and privilege. After moving to a farm near Martins Creek in 1974, he developed close relationships with the Sabatine family and other neighbors, photographing birthdays, graduations, weddings, dances, and barroom gatherings. The resulting juxtaposition examines class, public identity, desire, and the rituals through which people present themselves socially. Although informed by Fink's left-wing politics, he described the work as "political, but not polemical" and emphasized emotional, physical, and sensual empathy.
Across both settings, tightly framed black-and-white photographs concentrate on bodies in motion and moments of interaction. Faces, hands, formal clothing, cakes, plates of food, and drinks emerge from dark surroundings, while abrupt crops and oblique angles suggest the photographer's movement through crowded rooms. Flash-lit expressions and gestures produce alternating impressions of intimacy, tension, appetite, fatigue, and celebration. Because affluent partygoers and rural families receive the same close visual treatment, bodily gesture and social performance become points of comparison rather than evidence of a fixed moral hierarchy.
That continuity developed through Fink's use of a square-format twin-reflex camera and a handheld flash positioned separately from the camera. The off-camera light strikes figures at shifting angles, isolating details, creating pronounced divisions between illumination and shadow, and making his physical presence within each gathering perceptible. Fink called flash "a tool of the intuition" and treated photographing as an immersive, improvisational act. After New York parties, he often drove home to Pennsylvania, developed multiple rolls of film before dawn, and reviewed contact sheets that morning.
Public recognition began with Fink's 1979 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which brought the two social environments together in approximately forty photographs and received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Aperture published Social Graces in 1984 as Fink's first monograph, sequencing 69 photographs with his short accompanying text. An expanded powerHouse Books edition followed in 2001 with 92 duotone images. The Art Gallery of Ontario exhibited 25 works from its permanent collection in 2004-05, while the National Gallery of Art later acquired 91 photographs from the project. Subsequent museum and gallery presentations, including Cornell's collection-based exhibition and the 2024-25 survey Sensual Empathy, have sustained the project's institutional and photobook presence.
