There was an outpouring of grief among the creative community late last year in the wake of Larry Fink’s death. In a career spanning six decades, the American imagemaker turned his lens on everything from New York socialites at Studio 54 and Hollywood’s elite at the Vanity Fair Oscars party, through to daily life for rural, working-class Pennsylvanians, with his images often taking the form of social commentary imbued with humanism. He continued to photograph up until his death at the age of 82, mostly shooting on his 10-acre farm in Pennsylvania in later years.

The news came as a huge blow to Holly Hay, who had been working closely with the photographer on his digital retrospective, Larry Fink: A Life of Looking, since 2022. Hay first connected with Fink during the early part of the pandemic, when she was working at Wallpaper* and commissioned him to shoot a series of portraits for the magazine’s Design Awards issue.

“I had been the biggest fan of his work for some time and was really interested in the surprising projects that would come up. Him suddenly doing a campaign for Jil Sander, things like that just felt so surprising and I was really curious to understand what interested him,” Hay tells CR. “I was amazed by how open he was to collaborating. You could quite easily assume that someone who is so successful and prolific maybe isn’t interested in shooting, whereas the opposite was the case.”