FORBIDDEN PICTURES
by Larry Fink

Softbound, 9 " x 10" 24 pages
color plates
2004, powerHouse Books
Texts by Graydon Carter, Donald P. Russo, Steve Salerno, and Nelson R. Maniscalco

The powerHouse Gallery is pleased to present the twelve color photographs of the exhibition “The Forbidden Pictures: A Political Tableau” as well as the exhibition catalog The Forbidden Pictures by acclaimed photographer Larry Fink, a master of social photography and photojournalism, and author of three powerHouse Books monographs: Boxing, Runway, and Social Graces. A provocative political commentary, “The Forbidden Pictures” is a satirical look at America’s current leaders, referencing the decadence and style of Weimar artists George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann.

Originally set to run in The New York Times Magazine in the Fall of 2001, the tragic events of September 11 and the ensuing media self-censorship created an environment where Fink’s critical images of the president and his men were deemed unpublishable.

First exhibited at the DuBois Gallery at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, “The Forbidden Pictures” caused quite a sensation, as the office of director Ricardo Viera received nearly one thousand telephone calls and e-mails in two days.

Of particular offense was a four-by-four foot photograph of a George Bush look-alike fondling a woman’s breast. “The woman has to be seen as a metaphor for our foreign policy,” Fink told The Associated Press. “I think that would be appropriate for what we were doing in our foreign policy: Groping without any good understanding of what were were doing and taking advantage of our imperious power.”

Called “offensive” and “inappropriate,” this photograph outraged conservatives and republicans nationwide, including Steve Elliot of Grassfire.org, who told the Allentown Morning Call that the university should “do the decent and honorable thing and take the picture down.” Hardly a surprising reaction considering that the voice that mocks and questions our elected officials has all but been silenced throughout the Bush administration. Leave it to Fink to challenge the status quo.

Accompanying the show is a twenty-four page exhibition catalogue, The Forbidden Pictures, featuring four-color reproductions of the photographs on display at The powerHouse Gallery, as well as text by Graydon Carter, newspaper articles on the Lehigh University exhibition, and a selection of email responses to that show.

“The Forbidden Pictures: A Political Tableau” will be on exhibit at The powerHouse Gallery during the Republican National Convention, August 30–September 2, at Madison Square Garden, New York.

LARRY FINK’S ARTIST STATEMENT
Lessons in Democracy and Demagoguery
It was time—the election was stolen, robbed by middlemen on top. Folks who thought the past was the future because they owned the present. Entitlement didn’t come from being lazy; it came from cunning, aggrandizing connivance. The leader was a twice entitled frat boy, a thick-headed intellectual goon, with charisma informed by homily and stubborn gotcha comfort.

It was simple! I was shooting fashion, perhaps a compromise for me, but atrivial, jovial, stylish, learning theater. Why not use its public accessibility for subversion, satire, association, and education? An idea! One of my favorite periods in twentieth-century art was Weimar Germany, with Beckmann, Dix, and Grosz all melting down convention in an impassioned visionary way. Grosz was especially political, but all of the were hyper-aware of the decadence, the despair, the hysteria, and the lies. I suggested to The New York Times Magazine (whose rear end is sometimes gifted with fashion spreads) an idea to replicate the period but loosen it, update it, and tell it anew. There were fashion equivalents and certainlymoral and historical ones.

Oh the glee! They said yes. I suggested that rather than the corpulent Weimar German types, why not use our current fraudulent leaders, George W.and his cabinet. Oh the glee! They said yes. Political satire and critical acuity are something rarely if ever done in fashion. Yet another coup.

We searched for the cast of dancers, whores, merrymakers, and priests. We searched for the look-alikes of our own Mr. G. W. and his consortium. We found it all and went to work. Five paintings chosen from the period and three days shooting them, interpreting them, and creating aesthetic clarity and political bedlam.

The pictures were shot on 7/19/01 and were hypothetically scheduled to run in The Times in the fall. 9/11 gave birth to doom. The tragic inevitable moment, the rupture of providence, the rape of the external soul of America. And its aftermath.

Critical images of the president and his men would not be published. In fact, all critical thought was temporarily suspended and the fundamentalist Islamic conspiracy bore the turf for the fundamentalist neoconservative conspiracy that was already in wait for the history that would give it license and muscle. Its muscle isstill prominent and will be for some time.

As it became apparent that the presidential team was acting beyond the righteous knee jerk of antiterrorism, when the public critical spirit was onthe rise, I offered the pictures again to The Times. No! The New Yorker. No! Harper’s Magazine. No! The European market I felt sure would publish them. But no. Like their influences, the images were banned, not by decree, but through a suppression enabled by tragedy and coincidence.

Here in the halls of political science of Lehigh University, they speak their eye and tongue. They are free. But the ever-evolving question is, are we?—Larry Fink 12/4/03
artist statement from the Lehigh University exhibition of “The Forbidden Pictures”

LARRY FINK BIO
Photojournalist and educator Larry Fink began his career with a documentary on beatniks in the late 1950s. He was born in Brooklyn in 1941 and studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Currently a professor at Bard College, he has taught photography at Yale, Parsons School of Design, and New York University. He is represented by Bill Charles Inc. Fink has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as in major retrospectives at Les Rencontres de Photographie, Arles, France; Musee de L’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland; and Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time-Life Books, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice. The author of Boxing, Runway, and Social Graces (powerHouse Books, 1997, 2000, and 2001, respectively), Fink lives on a farm in Martin’s Creek, Pennsylvania.

Preview the exhibit at powerHouse Gallery

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