FLESH AND BONE LARRY FINK / MARTHA POSNER
NOVEMBER 17, 2024–APRIL 13, 2025
Martha Posner and Larry Fink met in 1992, and soon thereafter she joined him at his farm in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania. At the time, Fink was a celebrated photographer of multiple social worlds, while Posner was settled in her artistic practice but not her career. Inspired by indigenous art traditions and her encounters with shamanism, myth, and the animal world, she made ephemeral objects and installations. Then and now, their art seems utterly different. Posner’s sculptures are tactile objects that address us first with their materiality. Fashioned from disparate stuff including what she gathers in the woods and farmyard, they are by turns waxy, rough, hairy, prickly, or soft. Her drawings are similarly
material, sometimes made with thick oil stick or natural elements such as mud. Like her sculptures, they evoke dream-like realms of magic and bodily transfiguration. Posner’s art is rooted in myth and folklore, and it centers the experiences of women and girls.
By contrast, Fink’s cool black and white photographs appear as transparent windows onto observed scenes. In that simple sense, they are documentary. Yet there is myth in Fink’s world, too. He had canny street smarts and a Shakespearean eye for human behaviors and desires. With those tools he gleefully trespassed into milieux that were not his own (often on assignment for magazines), finding epic characters almost everywhere he looked.
Posner and Fink share other core artistic themes including desire, vulnerability, and brutality. Like myth, these are major aspects of human experience and important subjects for art in every time and place. The pair’s shared terrain is sometimes even more specific. With their broad common themes in view, this brief essay will examine several other ways their bodies of work augment and expand each other. It will explore wandering
as a creative approach; the animal world as a subject; and apparel as a motif.
Wandering
When Posner came to the Martins Creek farm, she took to the woods. She believes in magic and transfiguration and finds evidence of such processes in the forest. Consider her sculpture Wounded White Torso (1995), one of several found natural objects she brought into her studio. It is a segment of tree branch whose anthropomorphic resemblance to a woman’s body beckoned to her. She simply accentuated the form with paint and hair. In the same years, she also made works that lived in the forest, or at least looked as though they did. Using tangles of grapevine and other twining plants gathered on her walks, she created larger-than-life figures, garments, and beds. Sometimes these works were exhibited in art galleries before being given back to the elements. Fink photographed the creations in the fields and forests, occasionally with Posner in the pictures. These photographs are the clearest instance of their creative dialogue and influence upon each other’s work. Six can be found throughout the exhibition: Lilith (1993), Martha with Coat of My Lost Happiness
(1997), Martha with Heart Sculpture (1998), The Miller’s Daughter (2002), Martha’s Red Bed (detail) (2002), Martha in Woods with Mask (2003).
Sometimes Fink walked in the woods, too. We see this in his photographs of animals, discussed below. But his wanderings began much earlier, on the city streets of his youth. That was the same starting point for many photographers of his generation. Surprisingly enough, the streets were not his scene. He made some wonderful photographs, for example Las Vegas, Nevada (1966), a comic if menacing record of a dog tugging at a man’s pant leg. But street photographers typically take a cool and distanced approach to things. Fink liked them hot and close. Soon enough he found his beat, which is elemental and so simple that it sounds boring. He became a photographer of the places where people gather. For the rest of his life, he gravitated to social situations. His chosen scenarios are diverse, but they have one thing in common: all are overheated spaces of animal interaction. The jazz session, the debutante ball, the disco, the boxing gym, the American Legion Hall, the fashion show, the front porch, the back room, the barnyard. Perhaps no
other photographer has matched Fink’s ability to draw out all the meanings of mingling close together.
Posner sometimes wanders beyond the woods. She is drawn to locales with strong folk traditions, including magic, and a mix of indigenous belief systems with later imports such as Christianity. In 1994 she traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico during Holy Week. In a small church, she observed parishioners lift a carved wooden Christ figure from a glass coffin to place it on the cross. The sculpture had articulated joints, like a marionette. Posner was mesmerized by its lifelike qualities as it moved, and by the love with which the parishioners held it. One woman washed its feet. After returning to Martins Creek, she made an intense series of drawings from memory, using mud and pigments. Across the series, titled Oaxaca Easter, the figure appears variously male or female, sinewy or frail, old or young.
In Posner’s art, wandering belongs as much to her creations as to herself. The sculpture series Lupe’s Daughters (2009) consists of children’s dresses, posed as if they might be leading us down a path or into another realm.
And the winged creatures for Memory of Flight (2010) similarly appear as messengers to our conscious world.
The Animal World
From the 1970s onward, Fink occasionally roamed his property to photograph fellow creatures. In 1978 he made extraordinary records of praying mantises, entranced by their elegance, ferocity, and utter self-possession. He so loved the mantis photographs that he eventually published a small book of them. Tellingly, however, his deeper immersion in the animal world came after his contact with Posner. She has drawn animals throughout her life. In Pennsylvania, she sometimes produces multiple sheets of drawings in short bursts of energy. Typically, she depicts her creatures without additional context, as if they are magical or fantastical beings. Some of them are indeed imagined (the jaguars, for example) while others are drawn from life (or death), as she found them.
For both Posner and Fink, distinctions between human and animal behavior are mutable and ultimately not so interesting. Their animal subjects manifest lust, aggression, vulnerability, and love, just like us. Indeed, many of Posner’s
sculpted figures exist between the animal and the human. Memory of Flight III and IV (2010) and Mercy I, II, and III (2016-2020) all bear wax armatures that she likens to skin. All seem to be human, but certain figures bear antlers or wings, as if they are hybrid creatures or perhaps glimpsed during metamorphosis.
In the spring of 2020, at home in the early months of the Covid pandemic, Fink wandered into the woods and happened upon a community of frogs. He must have waited a long time to gain their tolerance. One of the resulting pictures is quite like his photographs of performing jazz musicians or exhausted partygoers: everyone apart yet nonetheless together.
Over the years, Posner and Fink lived with an ever-changing menagerie of pets. In 2016, Fink made a beautiful, heart-wrenching portrait of their beloved goat, Butch, in his final moments. By then he was deeply involved with a nearby farming family whose matriarch, Stacia, had been his nurse during a hospital stay and quickly became his friend. Posner later visited Stacia to thank her and returned home encouraging Larry to meet and photograph the family at their farm.
Between 2012 and 2019 he did just that, producing a mysterious and extraordinary body of photographs about animality, physical affection, family togetherness, and death. Photographs including Goose Slaughter (2012), The Haircut, Hellertown, PA (2015), and Pigs at Stacia’s (2019) emerged from that friendship.
Apparel
Fink was intermittently a fashion photographer, though he never bothered with the genre’s typical studio setups. Instead, he was a denizen of the fashion shows and their accompanying parties. We experience almost his entire approach between two photographs: Christian Lacroix, Paris (1998), a cropped, candid shot of models in the runway lights, and Etro Backstage, Milan (1999), an intimate view of a young tailor absorbed in his work, with a glimpse of other busy hands laboring beyond him. One can imagine fashion editors in the 1990s encountering Fink’s party pictures from the 1970s and deciding they wanted his aesthetic for whatever was next. Yet it’s worth noting that in all his work— party pictures and fashion pictures alike—his subject is not the clothes themselves, but
how people wear them: the poses they strike and the ways garments conceal or reveal their bodies. Consider Regine’s, New York (1977). We encounter a woman’s legs and lower torso, elegantly yet awkwardly draped in clingy silk. From the mirror reflections we see that her pant legs threaten to catch in her stiletto heels. Fashionable yes, and dangerous, too. We instinctively feel the reasons for her rigid stance: striking a pose; trying not to trip; maybe hoping to convince herself that she’s having the night of her life.
There is another important element in these photographs: how we look at each other. Fink’s dressed up subjects often come with oglers and admirers. Oslin’s Graduation Party, Martins Creek (1977), is a great example. A young woman in a skimpy two-piece outfit squeals or squirms in delight, with chest forward and arms behind her back, presumably held by the concealed figure immediately behind her. Beyond them, a seated young girl watches the situation with rapt attention.
Clothing is a central motif in Posner’s art. But it has an utterly different purpose than in Fink’s work. Rather than accentuating
the curves and muscles of alluring bodies, Posner’s garments often cloak and protect her figures, who are sometimes absent, leaving only the clothes themselves. She has explained that she thinks of coats as magic vessels, citing their frequent appearance in myth and folklore as vehicles for supernatural powers. Yet occasionally she treats garments as the opposite of safe. Her Charlotte drawings evolve from the myth of Frozen Charlotte, who in various folktales either flees her home without clothes after an argument with her father or—elegantly dressed for a winter ball—refuses to cover up with a cloak on her way to the party. In both versions, she freezes to death after disobeying paternal rules.
Posner’s large Unhealed drawings take this idea in another direction. Larger-than-life girls who seem on the cusp of adolescence stand in childhood dresses, holding toys and dolls. Despite their imposing presence, they look extremely vulnerable. We are left wondering if their garments are somehow connected to trauma or represent their efforts to escape it.
In 2017, the eruption of the #MeToo movement enraged and galvanized Posner.
Like millions of other women, she was flooded with memories of her past encounters with sexual harassment. Sexuality has always been a potent element in her art, but now she paired it with determined rage. She sketched a red cloak whose inner lining was filled with the words me too. Her friend, the costume designer Donna Maloney, made three cloaks based on the sketch, and Posner then meticulously inscribed and reinscribed the words on their linings. Next, she collected antique full-length slips and other undergarments, inscribing those in the same manner. She explains that these previously owned garments are not only stand-ins for women’s bodies. In a sense, they are consecrated by the past bodies that wore them. Here again, we encounter transfiguration in her art: in this case, the life force of a body inhabiting the work of art.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Judy and Fred Fiala
Charlotte and John Suhler
Ginny and Ravi Akhoury
Ellen Chapman and Michael Moss
Carole Crosby and Larry Wickless
Wil and Sally Hergenrader Endowed Fund for Special Exhibitions
The Kretzmer Family Charitable Foundation, in loving memory of Ernest Kretzmer
Amy Carol McGowan
Special thanks to Elizabeth and William Kahane and