Larry Fink's up close and personal celebrity photographs

As one of Vanity Fair's official Oscar party photographers, it's hard to believe Larry Fink is not familiar  with most of the celebrities he is shooting.

"It's absolutely true," said Fink by phone on his drive home from Bard College in upstate New York, where he has been a professor of photography for 19 years. "I don't watch TV or go to movies," he confessed, which may help him go undetected as he meanders along in the back rooms away from the red carpet paparazzi.

More than 90 of his candid photographs have been published in a coffee table-size collection, "The Vanities: Hollywood Parties, 2000-2009," (Schirmer/Mosel, $68).

The black-and-white documentary-style photos catch celebrities mingling at leisure with their guard down, acting rather, well, human. His pictures are the antithesis of the glamorous, artificial images the public is accustomed to seeing.

"In the early days it became apparent that whatever I did was OK. What they [Vanity Fair] were used to seeing was not what they were seeing in my work, so I was given carte blanche with my interpretation," Fink said. "I was their official eccentric photographer."

A shadow across the face, animated in mid conversation without pretense, his images are often unintentionally unbecoming. "I have no vendetta, no rage, no reason to make a picture that is unflattering," Fink noted.

50 Years of NASA Art at National Air and Space Museum

  When the space shuttle Atlantis lifted off for its final mission in July, it marked the end of an epoch at NASA. Many Americans were left wistful and nostalgic for more adventures of the final frontier. While NASA revamps for the future, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is offering a look back at the program through artists' eyes with "NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration."

 Initiated in 2008, the traveling exhibition, a collaboration with NASA and Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, includes Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder and William Wegman. More than 70 pieces are on view recording the triumphs and tragedies of space exploration over the last five decades.

"Space flight began in the imagination of artists long before government got into it," said James Dean, the founding director, now retired, of NASA's Art Program. He cites Buck Rogers and science-fiction author H.G. Wells as examples.

 The NASA Art Program was established in 1962, after the inception of the U.S. space program in 1958. "NASA knew what they were doing was important and would be taking more photos than any other federal agency," said Tom Crouch, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum.