Whilst most people might struggle through life gathering titles such as 'lover', 'co-worker', 'the smelly one on the bus', 'the one who always drinks too much at parties and ends up being sick on themselves/their friends/people in the street', not many could manage to accumulate 'photojournalist, political activist, fugitive and veteran of the 1960s New York scene.' Those kinds of accolades take some serious grit. For legendary photographer Nat Finkelstein though it’s all in a life’s work.
Finkelstein passed away in October of last year, but he leaves behind him a legacy of ballsy moves and iconic work that will ensure he’s never consigned to the scrapheap of mediocre crowd-pleasing snappers.
Starting out studying photography and design under Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper's Bazaar, Finkelstein then went on to work as a photojournalist for the PIX and Black Star photo agencies during the 60s, with a focus on emergent subcultures and the civil rights movement. In 1964, Finkelstein became court photographer in Andy Warhol's Factory where he stayed for three years shooting the work for which he is now probably best known. Following this – and literally from one extreme to the other - Finkelstein then spent fifteen years on the Silk Road in the Middle East, forced to give up photography after becoming a fugitive from the US when a warrant was issued for his arrest as a result of his work with The Black Panthers.
The exhibition of his work currently on show at the Ideas Generation Gallery in Bethnal Green is full of iconic black and white shots of Warhol and his followers that are fascinatingly intimate and compelling because of who’s in them and the insights they give. There’s also some of the type of work Finkelstein did with The Black Panthers that generated the warrant for his arrest and the subsequent escape east. So if you're curious about why all those accolades were acquired, take a look - it’s all there in black and white.
www.ideageneration.co.uk
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