Grey Art Gallery, NYU
Though Allen Ginsberg is best known as one of the most influential and controversial poets of the Beat Generation, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, an exhibit of Ginsberg’s photographs of such counter-cultural icons as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady among others, shows Ginsberg was nearly as handy with a pawn shop camera as he was with a pen and notepad.
Most of the eighty black and white “keepsakes,” as Ginsberg
described them, document a watershed time in a “floating world,” preserving “the sacredness of the moment,” while taking the viewer on a relaxed, yet riveting odyssey from 1953 to 1963. Along the way, the photographer and not-yet famous friends make their way from Ginsberg’s East Village apartment to San Francisco, Tangiers and beyond, as they blazed a trail out of the staid, stifling cultural conformity that had become the norm in post-war America. Beat Memories’ images capture the speeding days and mind-expanding nights, and occasional slow, sad afternoons when Ginsberg’s Howl, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Kerouac’s On the Road were changing the literary landscape. It shows the authors at work and play, modest and immodest, on tattered sofas, in bare light bulb living rooms, grinning madly, lounging languidly or staring straight-eyed and sometimes horrified into a future that had yet to be written, for they were the ones to write it.
Adding further interest to the exhibition are the hand-written captions that Ginsberg came to scrawl on enlargements of the original negatives after the pictures were discovered amongst papers he donated to Columbia University in the 1980s. Originally the snapshots were “meant more for a public in heaven than one here on earth,” Ginsberg said of the collection as his interest in photography developed anew with encouragement from renowned photographers Robert Frank and Bernice Abbott.
Rounding out the exhibit were several display cases of Beat Generation artifacts including original manuscripts, first editions of Howl and Naked Lunch and assorted correspondence between the audacious authors and their courageous publishers. The displays gave a tangible depth to the exhibit as evidence that while Allen, Bill, Jack and company were palling lustily around the globe, on highs, licit and otherwise, they somehow managed to get some real work done.
The only things missing from the Beat Memories experience were some be-bop jazz playing in the background and something in addition to the $50 catalogue available for souvenir purchase. Any number of the pictures on display would have made for great t-shirts. I doubt the photographer would have minded, considering in his later years Ginsberg was—like Burroughs and his paintings—happy to make more money from his photographs than he ever did from writing. After all, as Ginsberg himself said “If you are famous, you can get away with anything.”
Maybe not anything, but for the $3 suggested donation, this writer got more than his money’s worth. Hell, I’d have paid five bucks to see this.
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For More Information Visit:
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http://www.nyu.edu/greyart
