Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]

 I’m always aware of what’s holding my interest while I’m shooting, but I’m not analyzing my desires to the point of cooling things down—just to the point of understanding impulses as they come. 
 The moment that we have is the only moment we will ever have, insofar as it is fleeting. Every breath counts. 
 I’m a scoundrel, really. But there’s something about me that remains rather innocent when I’m looking at people… Also, I’m always slightly nervous when I’m taking a picture, though I do it obsessively and without shame. People may sense that and relax, or at least not feel threatened. 
 Human honesty and deception have been the core of my work. I am drawn to energy that is both constrained and unbounded and I try with the camera to fix the complexity of the moment: to create an infectious perception, so as to change the viewers’ aloof judgment to one of unavoidable, impassioned involvement. 
 People like to have their pictures taken. Some will endure the pain of flash-blindness because recorded experience is somehow more important to them than actual experience. It is a profound aspect of our culture, this compulsion for proof. 
 My approach [to teaching photography] is to assemble an avenue for passions to be expressed. I want students to understand that there are no good pictures taken when your camera is pointed at subject matter you’re not interested in. 
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