A Beat Poet’s Colorful Crew, in Black and White

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/arts/design/beat-memories-the-photographs-of-allen-ginsberg.html

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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a great poet but not a great photographer. So while “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” at the Grey Art Gallery is an interesting exhibition, it is in certain ways disappointing. The best you can say about the pictures Ginsberg took during two periods in which he dabbled in the medium — the ’50s and early ’60s and the ’80s and ’90s — is that they are the works of a competent amateur. The bigger disappointment, however, is that much of the history that Ginsberg lived through and did so much to alter as a countercultural activist is missing.

The exhibition was organized by Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art, where it had its debut in 2010.

From the early 1950s to about 1964, Ginsberg regularly used a cheap camera to take snapshots of his now famous pals, including the writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, as well as Neal Cassady, their logorrheic muse. Knowing that these young bucks were reanimating American literature and sowing the seeds of a broader cultural revolution makes them riveting to look at. But considering the incendiary stuff they were writing — “Howl,” “On the Road,” “Junkie” — and their bohemian lifestyles dedicated to the pursuit of sex, drugs and jazz, the photographs are remarkably tame.

Almost all are affectionate, more or less straightforward portraits made indoors and out. Many have a subtly playful spirit, like one of the poker-faced Burroughs standing next to a stone chimera in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1953 — “a brother Sphinx,” Ginsberg notes in a caption handwritten on a later print from the original negative. But whatever embarrassing or illicit behavior was going on in Ginsberg’s circle he left off camera.

Two pictures from 1964, however, are especially resonant historically. One shows Cassady lying in a bed, staring upward next to a woman who is languidly smoking a cigarette. Sunlight pours in through windows at the foot of the bed. They are at Millbrook, the New York estate that Timothy Leary and his fellow psychedelic explorers occupied at the time.

Ginsberg had joined Ken Kesey and his coterie, the Merry Pranksters, when their bus, driven mainly by Cassady, stopped in New York City. They went to Millbrook in hopes of having a meeting of minds with their East Coast comrades in their campaign for consciousness expansion. Leary refused to see them, however, and they left in disappointment, but not before Cassady spent some time tripping on the high-potency psychedelic drug DMT, according to Ginsberg’s annotation on a later print of the image.

The other image from 1964 shows a prematurely aged, grumpy-looking Kerouac slumped in an armchair on the last day he ever visited Ginsberg in Manhattan. The caption says that Kerouac is on DMT brought back from Millbrook, which explains why he is “shuddering with mortal horror.” Seeing these two photographs together is like beholding both sides of the future of the psychedelic revolution. First there would be peace and love at Woodstock, then the major bummer of Altamont.

Soon after taking those pictures, Ginsberg lost the camera he’d been using, and it would be another 20 years before he would return to photography. He put the prints and negatives he had made in a desk drawer, and they remained unseen until a cataloger discovered them in the archives of personal papers that Ginsberg had given to Columbia University, his alma mater.

Seeing these old snapshots reignited Ginsberg’s interest in photography, and he began taking pictures again, using better-quality cameras on the advice of the photographer Robert Frank, an old friend. Almost all of the images from this later phase, during which he began adding the matter-of-fact, handwritten captions to prints from old and new negatives, date from 1984 to 1996.

Most are portraits, including posed images of old friends like Bob Dylan and the painter Larry Rivers. There are two self-portraits, one a 1991 nude shot in a San Francisco hotel room mirror; the other, from 1996, showing him in a tweedy suit coat, tie and floppy hat — the professorial guise he adopted in his later years as a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Ginsberg’s motivation to take up photography again had a pragmatic side, as he admitted in a 1991 interview reprinted in the exhibition catalog. He points out that Burroughs made more money selling paintings he produced in his later years than he ever did from his writing. Ginsberg exclaims, “If you are famous, you can get away with anything!” Yet he seems to have had a properly humble attitude: “I know lots of great photographers who are a lot better than me, who don’t have a big, pretty coffee table book like I have. I’m lucky.”

Ginsberg did not burn to take photographs the way he did to write poems. There is no photographic equivalent here to “Howl” or anything so grandly Whitmanesque as “The Americans,” by Frank. What is most regrettable, though, is that Ginsberg abandoned the first phase of his photography career just when American society was beginning to undergo its unprecedented transformations. Imagine what a wonderful panorama of the hip and the happening he might have produced had he replaced the camera he lost and gone on to document that mind-blowing time and its Promethean heroes and saturnine villains.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>“Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” continues through April 6 at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village; (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart.