Behind closed doors

TO THE best of my recollection, I have never been to an Oscar party, Vanity Fair’s or any others, and yet I am prepared to believe that these photographs of those parties and a few related events, taken by Larry Fink, are entirely true to the experience.

The pictures are taken from up close, smack in the middle of things, and they convey a synesthetic experience — you can hear them, you can smell them, and you can feel their impact on your knees, elbows, shoulders and kidneys.

I don’t find it hard to imagine Larry working these rooms, while at the same time many of the individual photographs do cause me to wonder how he managed to position himself to obtain that particular angle while not disconcerting the subjects. Many of the people in the pictures are used to being photographed, of course, but that does not necessarily mean they’re always at ease with shutters going off when they’re not actually working. In any event, I know Larry well enough to be familiar with his personal style, which is straightforward, honest and without pretense. He possesses the authority to march into a situation and cause people to automatically defer to him, while at the same time he is sufficiently patient and concentrated to make himself invisible.

Fink might very well be a personal friend of some of the most stellar personalities present, but in working mode that counts for naught. Armoured by his gear, he makes his way through the room like an ornithologist in the jungle, keeping his eyes and ears open, swooping suddenly on a target and just as swiftly removing himself from the scene.

The opposite to Fink’s approach might be that of Andy Warhol, whose dominion over the genre of the party photograph is such that many young people today probably believe he invented it. But Warhol was already a celebrity in his own right when he began bringing a Polaroid camera to every social occasion, and for him photography was a deliberate performance, something he employed as a social ritual, an icebreaker, and a substitute for conversation.

Unlike Warhol, Fink does not have the slightest interest in celebrity for its own sake. You get the impression that as he takes pictures at these parties he is registering almost every detail except the identities of his subjects. He is naturally interested in them as people, but in a way that makes any random personal assistant or security heavy fully equal to the stars.

The Hollywood party pictures contained in this book could perhaps have been taken in no other era but ours. Fifty years ago the parties would have been either too stiff or too sodden; 30 years ago they would have been out of control, and maybe partygoers with a vested interest in not being recorded behaving in various ways would have ensured that no photographer could ply his or her trade there.

Today, media presence and publicity are understood as constants, like weather. There is no room for anything less than professional self-presentation. While half the room may be zipped out of their minds they also know it would be extremely bad form to let it show in such a setting. At least half the room would anyway be playing to imaginary cameras in the absence of any actual ones, and some of them are adept at projecting in the round, so they don’t even need to look for a keylight.

A hack photographer with no gift for composition would still manage to take perfectly acceptable boilerplate party shots because the partygoers would be happy to oblige, even as they were pretending not to pay attention.

That is one of the things Fink has to combat, of course. In the interest of making a good picture he is always having to undermine his subjects’ intentions. People who are obviously posing may make it into one of his pictures, but will appear with their heads cut off. I imagine him pretending he is photographing people’s faces when he is actually shooting their hands and laps and breasts — the very opposite of the sort of trickery street photographers get up to when people are shy about submitting their faces to the record. For Fink’s employers, the ideal picture is one of a famous person who is oblivious to the presence of the camera and who, while looking terrific, also appears just a bit unlike his or her usual portraiture.

Fink’s trick in photographing celebrities is to make them appear in the frame as if we had just rounded a corner on the way back from the toilet and surprised them in their element.

Thus Kate Winslet’s face is half-consumed by shadow — which emphasises her glamour even as it lends her a mask — and Quincy Jones remains saturnine and composed with the top of his head lopped off and most of his body tucked behind someone’s feathered dress. Angelica Huston, more than half hidden, is recognisable mostly because of her less famous but visually distinct husband; Elton John, buried deep in a composition, emerges only because of his hair and his glasses.

* Larry Fink The Vanities: Hollywood Parties 2000-2009 by Luc Sante, Ash Carter and Larry Fink, €49.80.Published by Schirmer/Mosel, Germany