PETER FINK. MY MIND’S EYE

An affinity for beauty shaped his life and work: the American photographer Peter Fink (1907, Grand Rapids –1984, New York City) first worked as a designer and art director in New York and Paris; he designed showrooms and product presentations for luxury by Lanvin and couture by Lelong. From the early 1950s onwards, he travelled, among other things for fashion assignments, throughout France, Italy, Portugal, North Africa, Mexico, Asia, his native USA – and made the camera his eye for all the worlds he discovered along the way.

Fink photographed street scenes, people in the countryside, high society, children at play. Later, he revealed architecture in an experimental way. His mostly black and white works – exquisite vintage prints, with lively expressive character and atmospheric contrasts – have been celebrated in more than 50 solo exhibitions worldwide and collected by renowned institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Nearly 15 years after the last solo exhibition, the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt now presents the comprehensive retrospective PETER FINK. MY MIND'S EYE. On display are more than 200 original photographs and objects from all phases of Fink's more than 30-year career. They convey the photographic artist's impressive variety of subjects as well as his respectful empathy for models and motifs. With never-before-seen images, the FFF show provides an opportunity for a reappraisal and rediscovery of one of America's most successful photographers.

The exhibition PETER FINK. MY MIND'S EYE was curated by Celina Lunsford, artistic director, and Andrea Horvay, curatorial assistant at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, in close collaboration with the estate of Peter Fink.

To accompany the show, the two FFF curators published already in May 2020 the book PETER FINK. MY MIND'S EYE. With 187 work illustrations, a curator’s essay and an illustrated biographical timeline, the authors shed new light on Peter Fink's life and work. Like the exhibition, the publication also contains many of the American photographer’s works discovered by the authors in the Peter Fink estate and until now not exhibited.

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PETER FINK. MY MIND’S EYE