Born and raised in New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg moved to New York City in 1943 to begin undergraduate study at Columbia University. There he met William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, who would become leading Beat figures. In 1953, Ginsberg purchased a small, secondhand Kodak camera and began photographing himself and his friends in New York, San Francisco, and on his travels around the world.
At the same time, he was developing his poetic voice. In 1955 he read his provocative and now-famous poem Howl to a cheering audience at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Both Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Ginsberg’s Howl were immediately hailed as captivating if challenging expressions of new voices and new visions for American literature. Celebrating personal freedom, sexual openness, and spontaneity, the two writers came to be seen as the embodiment of a younger generation—the Beats— who rejected middle-class American values and aspirations, and decried materialism and conformity.
Ginsberg abandoned photography in 1963, concentrating instead on his literary career. He wrote and published deeply moving and highly influential poetry for the rest of his life, including Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960 (1961) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (1972), which was awarded a National Book Award in 1974. Using his fame to advance social causes, he also continued to capture public attention as an outspoken opponent to the Vietnam War and American militarism, and as a champion of free speech, gay rights, and oppressed people around the world.
In 1983 Ginsberg became increasingly interested in ensuring and perpetuating his legacy. Inspired by the discovery of his old negatives and encouraged by photographers Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank, he reprinted many early photographs and took new portraits of friends and acquaintances, such as the musician Bob Dylan and the painter Francesco Clemente.
With their casual style, immediacy, emphatic autobiographical focus, and peculiar combination of past visions and present voice, Ginsberg’s photographs resonate with audiences. Although his photographs form one of the most revealing records of the counterculture Beat generation from the 1950s through the 1990s—tracing its journey from youth to old age—Ginsberg’s pictures are far more than historical documents. Drawing on the most common form of photograph, the snapshot, he created spontaneous, uninhibited pictures of ordinary events to celebrate and preserve what he called “the sacredness of the moment.”
Similarly, Ginsberg's drawings -or "doodles" as he called them- are intimate and powerful records of his imagination and attentiveness to the here and now. Visible are the artist's interests in Buddhism and diverse mythologies as well as his eagerness to re-asses and apply insights from these influences to his daily life and work.
