NAT FINKELSTEIN BIOGRAPHY

Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Nat Finkelstein studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper's Bazaar, and worked as a photojournalist for the Black Star and PIX photo agencies, reporting primarily on the political developments of various subcultures in New York City in the 1960s. In 1964, Finkelstein entered Andy Warhol's Factory as a photojournalist and remained for three years; Finkelstein's photographs from this period are now regarded as some of the most iconic of the time.

Since then, Finkelstein has exhibited his work worldwide in over seventy-five solo and group shows at museums and galleries including the Cedar Bar, the International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Photographer's Gallery, the Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, among many others. Finkelstein's photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and The Andy Warhol Foundation, New York; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hedendaagste Kunst Museum, Ghent; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many other public and private collections.

The author of The Andy Warhol Index (with Warhol, 1968), Andy Warhol: A Portfolio  (1990), Girlfriends (1991), Merry Monsters (1993), and Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, Finkelstein's photographs have appeared in top publications including Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, Harper & Queen, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, the London Times, The Observer, Rolling Stone, Etant Donne Marcel Duchamp, the East Village Other and many more.

Nat Finkelstein died peacefully at his home in Upstate New York on Friday, October 2, 2009.

A SHORT CHRONOLOGY OF NATHAN FINKELSTEIN*

Cursed by a rabbi one day when still a child, Nathan, called Zeitgeist, was stunned into another dimension — Space collapsed! — and from that moment forth would see where others saw a face only the whirling sparks, the Shekinah of divinity. With the shameless, unsavory tricks of a prestidigitator he learned the art of scrawling with light, that others could read in his luminous handwriting the Palimpsest of the Face! Around this exploding head he collected neural daemons whom he trained to dive into and burst out of the surface, leaving traves that resemble Kabuki maquillage. This he developed to such a degree that any one of his photographs can be read as a lecture on astronomy. He became — willed himself to become — the neurotransmitting Gnat of Zeitgeist, preying on nanoseconds. His world, like that of his precursors, dabblers in (glossy) Darkness & Light, Benvenuto Cellini and Gilgamesh, became concentric, Nathocentric, phallopetal, I and eye.

An urgency, a fantastic, hermetic lubricious curiosity, similar to the interest a Madagascan mantis takes in its seductive victims, bristles through these pictures. It is the transvestism of the soul that Philip IV saw in Velasquez. Anxious, pantocratic fisheyes that beam so plaintively out of heads. The Infanta, the Prince's Dog, a dwarf, Mother Teresa. And it is that same ventriloquil passion that transforms every image, the ability to look out of another's face with your own eyes.

David Dalton

*From German Fingerzeig (the art of pointing a finger at something).

Click for C.V.