Brightest Young Things

All words by Francis Chung.

All photos courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.  Copyright 2010 The Allen Ginsberg LLC.  All rights reserved.

Opening at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg is an engaging exhibition that explores the “snapshot poetics” of one of America’s most celebrated literary voices.  Eighty black-and-white portraits and candids captured between 1953 and 1996 survey Ginsberg’s unique insider’s view on the life and afterlife of the Beat Generation of countercultural writers that he spearheaded in 1950s along with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac.  In addition to their documentary value, the exhibition also seeks to foreground the aesthetic qualities of Ginsberg’s images, providing an occasion to reflect upon the potentialities of photography as a vernacular medium for visual poetry.

“If you’re famous,” Ginsberg once quipped, “you can get away with anything!”  Shooting fast and loose, the self-taught Ginsberg paid as little heed to the norms of picture-making as he did to those of poetry.  To be sure, he was not a virtuosic photographer by most conventional standards.  Indeed, it seems fair to wonder whether or not Ginsberg’s images – which he said were “meant more for a public in heaven than one here on earth” – would warrant a solo exhibition at the National Gallery were it not for the iconic status of the author and his subjects.  These photos, as Ginsberg acknowledged, are “snapshots” – the kind of spontaneous pictures of friends and family that today might end up posted on Facebook or Twitter, if a lucky social-media user happened to bring along a camera while going to The Met with the author of Naked Lunch or taking a stroll though Tompkins Square Park with the singer of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”  Make no mistake: in this exhibition, one basks in the afterglow of celebrity as much as in the aura of works of art.  Much of the fascination of the photographs comes from the remarkably intimate visual access they provide to Ginsberg and his circle of “angel-headed hipsters.”  Whether it was Burroughs admonishing Kerouac to move out of his mother’s house during a “funny second’s charade” on Ginsberg’s living-room couch, or a “young & vigorous” Cassady striking a deal with a North Beach used-car salesman, Ginsberg’s photographs capture ordinary moments in extraordinary lives before, during, and after the episodes that made them legendary.

Unsurprisingly, the National Gallery’s exhibition reveals Ginsberg’s photographic style to be decidedly literary in character. Many of the prints on display are unusually verbose, having been inscribed with handwritten captions in which Ginsberg commented upon the people, places, and events depicted, sometimes decades after they the initial capture.  The images themselves display a keen sense of visual grammar, with pictorial elements often arranged like parts of a linguistic proposition.  A 1955 photo of Cassady and “his love of that year” in San Francisco, pointedly frames Cassady under a cinema marquee advertising The Wild One, an apt slogan for the man would become Kerouac’s prototype for the freewheeling protagonist of On the Road.  A number of photographs include visual rhymes or puns that evince the mischievous, often sexually suggestive wit Ginsberg often demonstrated in his poems. In a photo of Cassady lying in bed with a female companion, the woman’s foot is positioned in such a way that, at first glance, it can be mistaken as a penis protruding from Cassady’s shorts, a (perhaps accidental) pictorial trick made all the more eye-catching by being situated at the apex of a large triangular shadow.  Commendably, the exhibition does not heavy-handedly overplay the relationship between Ginsberg’s literary and photographic aesthetics, but numerous works easily lend themselves to speculations thereupon.

By the end of the show, it is clear that time is the great subject of Ginsberg’s photography. Ginsberg spoke with metaphysical awe of a photograph’s ability to record “certain moments in eternity,” and the motion blurs, misfocusings, and haphazard compositions that are sometimes apparent in his earlier pictures indicate an almost frantic desire to capture the “sacredness of the moment” before it passed, as if taking things slower might have led to something essential being missed entirely.  Moving through the exhibition, one watches the often-exhilarated energy of the Beat-era photographs gradually give way to the quieter, more contemplative mood of the later work in which Ginsberg documented the passage of time as marked on the faces and gestures of his relatives, lovers, and friends who were no longer quite so “angel-headed.”  In one of the earliest photographs on display, a vibrant 31-year-old Kerouac makes a “Dostoyevsky mad-face” as he strides dynamically through Manhattan in 1953, bursting with the defiant invincibility of youth.  Made eleven years later, Jack Kerouac the last time he visited my apartment (1964) shows the same man slumped pathetically in a chair, almost unrecognizably bloated from the alcoholic excesses that would kill him in another three years, caught “shuddering with mortal horror,” as Ginsberg noted.  The images form a touching, melancholic counterpoint, testifying to the inexorability of time that, Ginsberg believed, only the camera could stop for an instant, transfixing images that might endure in and as memories.

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