Allen Ginsberg's Beat Family Album
The famous beat poet's photographs reveal an American counterculture at work and play
- By Mark Feeney
- Smithsonian magazine, June 2010, Subscribe
The two men pose for the camera at right angles to each other. They’re in a room in Tangier in 1961. Nothing in the picture indicates place or time, though, and neither really matters to understanding the image. Clearly, it’s about who rather than where or when. You don’t have to know that the subjects are the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, in back, and Gregory Corso, in front, to realize this is the case. The photograph is all about the two individuals in it, both separately (each man has a striking appearance) and together. In fact, what most comes across is a sense of conjunction: “Siamese poetry twins,” as Ginsberg writes in his caption. True, a right angle, being square, isn’t exactly Beat geometry; but that very squareness makes the angle all the more solidly joined.
The photograph, which was likely taken by Ginsberg’s longtime lover, Peter Orlovsky, is one of some six dozen that make up “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg,” which will be at the National Gallery of Art through September 6. Ginsberg started taking photographs as a young man, in the 1940s, and kept doing so through 1963, when his camera was left behind on a trip to India. The result was a kind of Beat family photo album: informal, affectionate, full of personality—and personalities. We see, among others, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Orlovsky. Ginsberg liked to say he was “fooling around” with the camera (whether behind or before it). These were pictures, he felt, “meant more for a public in heaven than one here on earth—and that’s why they’re charming.” As befits such casually taken images, Ginsberg would have them developed at his corner drugstore.
“Every writer since the invention of the Kodak has probably made snapshots,” says Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, who organized “Beat Memories.” Yet very few have amassed a notable body of photographic work. Ginsberg thus joins Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Eudora Welty and Wright Morris (who’s probably better known today for his photographs than for his novels).
Ginsberg resumed taking pictures, more seriously, in the early 1980s. He was inspired by the example of an old friend, the photographer Robert Frank, and a new one, the photographer Berenice Abbott. “What’s interesting about Ginsberg is he makes a lot of pictures from 1953 to 1963,” says Greenough. “Then it’s only beginning in the early 1980s that he rediscovers them. By then he’s already established himself as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He can then, if you will, afford to turn his attention to photography. I think photography came at the right moment in Ginsberg’s career.”
Ginsberg began using better cameras and having his photographs printed professionally. “I had been taking pictures all along,” he told an interviewer in 1991, “but I hadn’t thought of myself as a photographer.” The most noticeable difference was a simple yet distinctive way he found to marry image and text. He began writing captions, sometimes quite lengthy, on each print. He extended the practice to earlier photographs, too. His images, Ginsberg felt, “all had a story to tell, especially the old ones,” and his captioning was a way of acknowledging that. Ginsberg’s printers had to start making his images smaller to leave room for the words he was writing beneath them—not so much captions, really, as brief excerpts from a running memoir.
Ginsberg spoke of his photographs as his “celestial snapshots.” He could as easily have been referring to artistic stardom as the heavens. In addition to shooting fellow Beats, Ginsberg photographed Robert Frank, Bob Dylan, the painter Francesco Clemente and the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The biggest star of all was Ginsberg himself. Not an especially handsome man, he nonetheless had an attractiveness the camera responded to. Frank considered a Richard Avedon nude portrait of Ginsberg and Orlovsky the best photograph the celebrated portraitist and fashion photographer ever took.
You can see in the double portrait with Corso how photogenic Ginsberg was (strange that he should look a bit like Arthur Miller in it). You can also see from the way he appraises the camera that this is someone already very much aware of the lens and what it can do. The camera’s partiality to Ginsberg is no less apparent in the self-portrait he took 35 years later on his 70th birthday. It’s evident how well he’s weathered the blunt passage of time (not something that can be said of Corso in Ginsberg’s 1995 portrait). The intensity of the gaze, the nest-like invitingness of the beard, the air of sage authority: Ginsberg has the look of a rather sexy, and very dapper, rabbi. How dandyish of him to note the provenance of his clothes. Have “Goodwill” and “Oleg Cassini” ever otherwise figured in the same sentence?
Mark Feeney, who covers the arts and photography for the Boston Globe, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
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Comments (5)
I just discovered these photos and what a treasure trove they are. As a fan of Ginsberg and the other Beats the photos speak volumes about the lives and sensibilities of these artists. They all have a certain air about them and the faces and expressions are worthy of study and appreciation.
I am glad the Smithsonian is focusing on these writers and their lives.
Posted by Kevin on November 26,2010 | 11:14 PM
Dear Mr. Logan:
If you think Allen Ginsberg was an idiot maybe you need to read "A Supermarket in California", one of his poems which clearly did not come from the mind of an idiot.
Posted by Gene on August 11,2010 | 01:19 PM
Ginsberg was an idiot who had nothing useful to say. He would have been ignored at any other time in history. Modern culture however is always short of new trash.
Posted by Gordon Logan on June 28,2010 | 09:49 AM
I can't thank you enough for your article about and photographs from Ginsberg's Beat Family album. As a 17 year old from Ponca City, Oklahoma, it was my great fortune to have the San Francisco Bay area assigned to me as my first duty station out of the U.S. Navy boot camp. I arrived in the Bay at the height of the Beat Generation and West Coast jazz and was blessed to have been a close observer of both of these art forms. Sadly, the past generations can only remember the Beat Generation as a bunch of scaggly bearded, beret wearing, bongo beating "beatniks" as portrayed by the character, Maynard Krebs on the Dobie Gillis show. In 1955 I had to have my mother's written permission to check out Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" from the Ponca City public library. The novel had been banned from the public school system, by the Oklahoma government, primarily because of Steinbeck's use of the word "okie". How many people can remeber that Ginsberg's poem "Howl", published by Ferlinghetti's City Lights book store and also fought in the ensuing court battles by Ferlinghetti, caused the release from literary censorship that existed in the United States. The resultant freedom from censorship allowed me to read, for the first time, Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover",Reange's (sic) "The Story of O" and other books previously banned. If I can remeber correclt, the opening line of "Howl" began with "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, etc." Turn on CNN on any given day and with the chaotic economic disaster along with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it makes you believe that Ginsberg's words are just as appropo today as they were in the late 1950's. In parting, I would say that Keroauc's "On the Road" impacted my life at the age of 17 as much as McCarthy's "The Road" did at the age of 69. Thank you, once again, for bringing back fond memories of one of the greatest literary movements of not only my generation but of my life.
Larry Large
Posted by Larry Large on June 14,2010 | 02:21 PM
That you think Allen Ginsberg's photos are worthy to print is ludicrous. I considered to drop my subscription, except that often the articles have very well grounded subjects.
Posted by D on June 10,2010 | 05:04 PM