Even Robert Frank, the great photographer of America, makes it into the show. There is a marvelous picture of Neil Cassady, caught in an embrace with a woman beneath a movie marquee featuring Marlon Brando in The Wild One Cassady, the model for protagonist Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road, comes across in the photo as the charming rogue he actually was-truth always lies just under the surface in these documentary images. Even so, the images are important because they have been taken by a master poet and historian, whose literary discipline belies the informality and randomness of a life lived on the boundaries of New York, both geographically and culturally. His pictures of the seasons in his building’s back yard, taken through the window in his kitchen are so straightforward as to be esthetically negligible, but demonstrate an awareness of nature in the midst of city life. Ginsberg himself poses nude both early and late, with the latter image, taken in a hotel room in late 1991, revealing a pot belly and a slightly quizzical expression. His milieu is the stuff of legend, much of it so well known that Ginsberg’s handwritten explanation beneath his images can seem slightly redundant but the poet is resolute in his determination to fix in memory the moments of idiosyncrasy and the pleasures of free love that characterized the Beats.īeat movement poets Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder are both represented-Corso is seen in a tiny attic room in France and Snyder in Zen monastery gear in Japan. Ginsberg often gave his inexpensive 35-mm camera to friends so they could capture his remarkable presence movingly, he comes across in the images of himself as a bit goofy, but also warm-hearted man of unusual intelligence. Peter Orlovsky, something of a poet but best known as Ginsberg’s long-term companion, can be seen cavorting naked in the countryside Burroughs’ cadaverous charisma reminds us that, beyond the romanticism, literature of a serious sort was indeed being written and a classic image of Jack Kerouac silently mouthing off on the street, in front of a statue of a stature in Tompkins Square Park, indicates that wildness pervaded the tissue of relations among these very gifted and equally rebellious proponents of alternative culture. While the images may evoke little in the way of fine art interest, the super-size egos of Ginsberg’s pals make their urban romanticism a way of life. If it is true that a certain Sturm und Drang characterized his milieu, Ginsberg nonetheless had the presence of mind to know that this was indeed a magical moment in American cultural history. In these wonderful, straightforward snapshots, Ginsberg captures a magical time in New York, where rents in the East Village were remarkably cheap, allowing him to write his declamatory poetry and document writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and major counterculture figures like Dylan and Wavy Gravy. Instead, he was a literary shutterbug who returned to many images he had of his early years, mostly taken of friends on the Lower East Side, and annotated them with anecdotes and stories whose interest is equal to his photographs. Despite immortalizing his pals, Ginsberg cannot be seen as a formalist at all. As a way of recording the moment by someone who fully believed in living in the moment, Ginsberg’s photography tends to produce-at least for this writer-an aching nostalgia for a fast and loose New York whose marginal neighborhoods were not yet gentrified. We have all heard of Allen Ginsberg, the ecstatic poet of Howl and “Walt Whitman in the Supermarket,” but not quite as many know that he was an assiduous documentary photographer who focused on relatives, friends, and lovers. New York City, 21 Myself seen by William Burroughs, Kodak Retina new-bought 2’d hand from Bowery hock-shop…, 1953, printed 1984-97. Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University
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