The Outer Picture of the Inner Life...Larry Fink

The following is a post by photographer Larry Fink, whose daily posts on Facebook, are a potpourri of poems, rants, musings, and observations about life, love, and of course photography. His blog is also worthy of investigation, as it keeps an up to date diary of his photographic travails.

They are killing the children.... in their pursuit of creating a cutting edge, ready to get into Yale group of students,,, the erudite competitive professors of the narrow world of hyper ambition, attempt to leach the essential emotive and clumsy manifistations from the soul of the child.... telling them if they want to pursue the topics of love....or lust, or simple stories, or fascinations with cats...or silly simpering visual poems of envy....amongst almost anything else which pertains to the direct experience of the world...the overarching response to such naive and organic desire is to call it cliche.....inhibit the fundamental curiosity so deeply emboldened by emotions and head it off into the arena of cool....glib, ensconced with artifact and smart assed deviance, art work which appeals to gallerists and collectors, to limpid well trained curators (nice as they can be) who baby sit photography attempting to create a hybrid... a strain which pertains to itself and the perpetuation of photography as an absolute...sort of like the ruling by the Supreme Court that corporations are a voice, they are the people... it has developed a magnet for photographic solipsism all things pertaining to photo self...heartfilled story telling practitioners be damned... or at least excused from the room...

I tell kids...boo.... that everything, including tepid formalism is cliche... the only thing which is not... is the way that they experience the world, that they are unique and the way that they see is like none other...that does not mean that they are singular and isolated from the tribe but that they must only answer their own calling....that which is in them which represents hunger, love, danger, tenderness, all of the primary affairs of the heart and its curiosity must be answered to and pursued to an obsessive degree..... the way to use photography is as a tool to find the outer picture of the inner life, and then through the tools of the medium, find ways to advance that vision so that it takes on a startling revelatory clarity... and presto...only then by that intense singularity they may lead the world into another dimension called personal vision.

well, that's one way to wake up...for a guy with nothing to say I'm pretty noisy this morning.

Mobilize as we all try to make it stick....

photo by Larry Fink