David Finn

His father, Jonathan (1885–1971), worked as a writer; his mother, Sadie (Borgenicht), created dresses for children.

His father, who employed Finn as his pen name, changed the family name when David was in high school.

David Finn (August 30, 1921 – October 18, 2021) was an American public relations executive, photographer, and historian of sculpture.

He is known in public relations as a co-founder of the Ruder Finn firm.

In addition to his career in public relations, Finn was a lifelong historian and photographer of sculpture.

Finn was born David Finkelstein in New York City on August 30, 1921.

Finn enrolled in the City College of New York in 1939 and graduated with a bachelor's degree four years later.

He then served briefly in the Army Air Forces during World War II.

Finn married Laura Zeisler in 1945.

She was classmates at Hunter College with his younger sister, Helen.

They remained married until his death.

Together, they had four children: Kathy, Dena, Amy, and Peter.

Finn died at the age of 100 on October 18, 2021, at his home in New Rochelle, New York.

Photographs by David Finn in the David Finn Archive, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC.

Finn co-founded the Ruder Finn public relations agency in 1948 along with Bill Ruder.

Over the years, his clients included Perry Como, John D. Rockefeller III, and John F. Kennedy, among many others.

Ruder Finn has also represented many Fortune 500 companies, universities, not-for-profit organizations, and foreign governments.

Finn was also an influential historian, author and photographer of sculpture.

Besides contributing his photography to books by art historians, he wrote articles about sculpture for the Congressional newspaper Roll Call and the National Sculpture Society's quarterly journal Sculpture Review, which he headed as editor-in-chief during the 1990s.

His photographs have appeared in over 100 books on the history of sculpture, many of which he authored.

Finn's photographs of sculpture have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, L'Orangerie in Paris, the American Cultural Center in Madrid, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Municipal Art Society in New York.

Finn applied an artistic style to his photographs of sculpture.

He employed raking light and high-contrast black and white to emphasize the drama and three-dimensionality of sculpture.

In addition to overall shots, he often focused on close-ups and details, which allowed him to isolate and abstract small sections of his subjects.

This idiosyncratic style earned him favor with contemporary sculptors like Henry Moore, whose work Finn photographed extensively.

Finn photographed both Western and non-Western sculpture, including major works from the European canon from the 12th to the 21st centuries, and examples of sculpture from Mesoamerican, Oceanic, and many other traditions.

Finn photographed the works of important contemporary sculptors, such as Henry Moore and Eduardo Chillida.

He was noted for capturing well-known sculptures from novel angles, like many of his in situ photographs of monumental sculpture.

The collection includes many of the original photographs that Finn used for his publications on various topics related to sculptural history.

Much of the collection is digitized and available for viewing at the Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library website.

Finn donated his archive of photographs to the Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC in 2016, where it contributes to the department's goal of providing a visual record for the study of art.

The David Finn Archive includes over 140,000 images in various forms, including photographic prints, negatives, and transparencies.

The subjects represented in the archive span the history of sculpture and range from figural to abstract.