As a photographer, Peter Fink was a late caller.

Born in 1907 in Grand Rapids as Samuel Nelson Peter Finkelstein, the American worked as a designer after studying art in Chicago, including in the carpet industry.

So he came to New York in the early 1940s, where he worked as Art Director for V'Soske, a specialist in custom-made carpets with designs by American artists.

At that time, in his thirties, he began to take photographs and documented the elaborate woven goods on color film.

Christian Riethmüller

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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But soon the camera was more than just a means of documentation for him. Blessed with a pronounced sense of beauty and on the move in a world of art, design, fashion and luxury, the photographs not only saved Fink's impressions, but also his view of things and the world. The camera lens was his recording device and his translator - "my mind's eye", as he once described it and as an excellent retrospective of his work in the Frankfurt Photography Forum is now entitled. The shows 242 objects, including more than 200 vintage prints from the estate of the photographer, who died in 1984, was one of the stars of his time and is almost forgotten today, although his works are in important collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt.

A constant companion

If Peter Fink's photographic work is remembered in Frankfurt of all places, it has to do with family connections. The photographer's widow, Monique Fink, brought his extensive archive to Germany more than twenty years ago, but apart from two smaller exhibitions in 1999 in what was then America's stores in Frankfurt, Mainz and Heidelberg and in 2005 in the Kunsthalle Mannheim , was stored in shipping rooms until, in 2018, Monique's brother, the Frankfurt lawyer Robin Fritz, asked the Photography Forum whether there would be any interest in intensively sifting through this archive. Andrea Horvay and Celina Lunsford, who at the time were involved in the conception of the exhibitions in the America Houses, were only too happy to get to work and were not only welcomed by the crowd,but also surprised by the quality and complexity of the estate.

While Fink had initially used the camera for documentation, it soon became a constant companion and also a work tool.

Fink had switched to the French fashion label Lucien Lelong, where he was not only responsible for public relations, but also photographed fashion himself and began an intensive travel activity that he continued into old age.

He traveled to many European countries as well as to North Africa, both on business and privately, where he not only photographed fashion or documented design studies, but also captured his impressions of the localities and life there.

Architecture and nature

Lunsford and Horvay have placed the focus of the exhibition on these photos, which were taken all over the world, showing Fink as a master of street photography who captured motifs full of intensity with a special eye for the moment. In terms of quality, these street scenes are on a par with those of Fink's famous contemporaries, for example from the Magnum agency, and they often seem downright poetic. “Peter Fink wasn't an agency photographer with a specific assignment and was therefore not exposed to any pressure. So he could take his time, ”says Celina Lunsford, describing an important aspect of Fink's work, which only began in the 1960s to shoot series of commissions, for example for the American Federation of Art or the famous Life magazine, but was not exposed to any production pressure.

In addition to fashion, design and portraits of celebrities such as Brigitte Bardot, Fink increasingly devoted himself to architectural photography and now began to experiment, for example with the effect of reflections, such as his impressive series "Refractions", the facades of high-rise buildings in New York, Chicago and San Francisco presented in an almost abstract way. They stand in attractive contrast to another facet in Fink's work, nature photography. In 1966, the photographer, who lived in New York in the famous Dakota Building on Central Park and thus in the neighborhood of celebrities like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, converted a barn in rural Connecticut into a studio, where he photographed plants and flowers with passion. If these recordings are reminiscent of the paintings of old masters in museums, that is only logical. Finch,who found himself in museum collections during his lifetime and whose work had been presented in over fifty solo exhibitions around the world, was primarily committed to beauty.

"The show" is until January 9, 2022 in the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Braubachstr.

30–32, see.

Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

A catalog has been published.