New Year's Eve Party, American Legion, Bangor, Pennsylvania 1979

Larry Fink made this gelatin silver print, New Year's Eve Party, American Legion, Bangor, Pennsylvania, sometime in the last century. It's a record of a specific place and time, caught in shades of gray. Look at the way Fink uses light – how it falls across the faces, the hats, the clothes. It’s like he's sculpting the scene with shadows, bringing out the textures of the fabric and the character in those faces. The contrast is sharp, almost like he's digging into the moment, trying to pull something out. There is a lineage from someone like Rembrandt to Nan Goldin in this way of using light to get to some kind of deeper truth. It's not just about what things look like, but about what they feel like, and how they make us feel.