Customer Reviews

Snapshot Poetics: Allen Ginsberg's Photographic Memoir of the Beat Era

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Ginsberg's on-and-off fascination with photography left some intimate records of the lives around him. We see a slim and young full-mopped Ginsberg, smiling on a ship "smoking what," and candid shots of Burroughs, Kerouac, and other less famous Beats as they interacted with each other. You will find that there's much more to the camaraderie of these guys than just trying to get laid (re: the other review).

Ginsberg's on-and-off fascination with photography left some nice intimate records of the lives around him. We see a slim and young full-mopped Ginsberg, seen smiling on a ship "smoking what," and candid shots of Burroughs, Kerouac, and other less famous Beats as they interacted with each other. You will find that there's much more to the camaraderie of these guys than just trying to get laid (re: the other review).

It is interesting to see all the old men with their 'boys' in the photographs from the 1980s. Seems that the beats' endless search for kicks and highs always ended up with the ego-centered desire to prove that they could get laid. Yes, we know that the beats got laid, although their writing about sex always was at about a 9th grade level.

What is weird to a mature eye is that they never got over their childish obsessions with young flesh. And the boys, some cute, most just young, live out their lives as footnotes to the stars. In the age of AIDS, most of the beats would have died before becoming famous at all. Something for young new 'beats' to think about now--before they too become just dead footnotes.

Ginsberg showed love in the early pictures--later, just cold views of the famous and their young sex objects--over and over and over. The beats used people; many in the photographs killed themselves or were pushed out of history. Ginsberg gives us a snapshot of how the myth was created.