REVIEW: Trevor Carolan reviews Allen Ginsberg’s photographs at Presentation House Gallery
“We Are Continually Exposed to the Flashbulb of Death”: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (1953-1996). Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver.
In Chinese, there is a Tang Dynasty maxim: “Every poet a painter, every painter a poet.” We have comparatively few such examples in Western culture—William Blake springs immediately to mind, but it thins after that. With this outstanding exhibition, perhaps it is no surprise that Allen Ginsberg, certainly America’s best-known, if not best-loved poet of the 20th century (Carl Sandburg set a high bar)—often declared that he received his poetic spiritual transmission in a vision from Blake.
For more than forty years, the poet packed a small Kodak Retina camera practically everywhere. Ginsberg never pretended to be a photographic artist, although with friendships that included Richard Avedon and filmmaker Robert Frank (images of both in the show), he had opportunities to sharpen his skills. Did he take photography seriously? You bet. Where he differs from another shutterbug stenographer-of-the-moment like Andy Warhol is in the fundamental grounding of his creative sensibility. Ginsberg termed the aesthetics of his decades-long fascination for photo-documenting meetings and public occasions with friends and colleagues a “snapshot poetics” and published a collection of this same title (Chronicle, San Francisco, 1993) in which a number of the photographs in this show appear. Ginsberg spoke of his interest in taking pictures as “sacramental documentation,” and came to recognize that the images he created were “valuable and historically interesting—maybe even art.”
Familiar Beat faces run right through the exhibition. There is an abundance of images of novelist William Burroughs, from the earliest days of his romantic friendship with Ginsberg, through periods of The Yage Letters, his time on the lam in Tangier, and later at Naropa University where he often taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg photographed Burroughs for almost 40 years.
The exhibition also features images of other friends—poet John Giorno, Herbert Huncke looking strung out and cadaverous; many of filmmaker Robert Frank, ethnographer and music archivist Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, Brit poet Basil Bunting (1973), punk pioneers Jello Biafra and Kathy Acker, Yevgeny Yevtushenko at his dacha outside Moscow (1965), Robert Creeley, controversial psychologist R.D. Laing, on and on.
Less well known are the family photographs of Ginsberg’s Russian grandmother and schoolteacher, fellow poet, and dad, Louis, ill with cancer in ’76. Homoerotic shots of youthful boyfriend and subsequently life partner Peter Orlovsky appear from across the years—on the road in Mexico with his brother, Lafcadio; in North Africa, India, with his own ill-starred family, and aging together with Allen in various U.S. locations
Ginsberg’s “sacramental friendship” with Jack Kerouac is celebrated with some vintage images we’ve come to expect. There’s an iconic photo of Kerouac with railroad brakeman’s rule book, probably taken in 1953, at time of Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans with its verboten theme of interracial love. Ginsberg captures Kerouac looking exactly like the kind of fella who could take the heat for falling in love with Mardou Fox, his Afro-American lover of that time. and a rarely-seen image of her appears too. Kerouac, like his mythic On The Road buddy Neil Cassady turns up a lot. There’s more than a little of both men in James Dean and Hollywood’s commercial hustle in carving off a slice of renegade Beat independence for popular cinematic consumption becomes clear through Ginsberg’s portraits.
Whether it’s New York or San Francisco, red brick walls and back-alleys are leitmotif in Ginsberg’s world and work. Architecture, mood and light are constants, and likely unintended elements in the photographs. Curiously, one of the most powerful additions to the work is Ginsberg’s own unmistakable handwriting in the captions beneath each black and white image. The history and information the captions impart provides superb context for appreciating each photograph, and prompt the viewer’s own free associations with names and places, restaurants and locations encountered in Ginsberg’s poetry. An example is “View From My Kitchen Window”. Taken in August, 1984 from his beat, rent-controlled Stuyvesant Town apartment in lower Manhattan, it’s a shot of grimy brick tenements, weathered fire-escapes and an enclosed courtyard of wet ailanthus trees. This is where the great poet lives? Then the caption-note: “I had tea every morning almost a decade looking out my kitchen window before I realized it was my world view.”
In San Francisco, where the Beat Generation phenomenon really kicked into overdrive when Ginsberg and his Big Apple confrères encountered the S.F. Bay Area Renaissance poets, Ginsberg’s camera-eye kicks into overdrive. His passion for Denver stud Neil Cassady is reflected in a series of blue jeans and T-shirt portrayals: Cassady browsing for used cars, handsome Neil with wife Carolyn who would soon welcome Neil’s friend Kerouac into a historic ménage à trios, Neil with LSD-promoter Timothy “Easy Travel to Other Planets O’Leary” during the Merry Pranksters’ famous Electric Kool-Aid tour. More importantly, there’s the simple Montgomery Street apartment where Ginsberg wrote Howl after his attempt to live the straight life for a while—working as a copywriter and dating girls. This, the photographs tell us, is where the work gets done, the history made. In the everyday moments—in places that look a lot like our own ordinary life.
Other Beat pantheon heroes turn up too. Gregory Corso, with his appetite for the dark side is caught in superb side-profile at the Beat Hotel on Rue Git-le-Coeur in Left Bank Paris, 1957. It’s one of the best images in the show. This was when Corso wrote his incendiary poetry in Gasoline, while Ginsberg worked on Kaddish down the hall and Kerouac banged away at Satori In Paris, all in the same cheap digs that today is a tony boutique hotel off the Rue St. Andre-des-Arts. What a remarkably productive period for modern literature in lean times! Corso also figures in one of the many shots of Ginsberg naked, the pair of them giggling, veering their willies with their hands, and we see how John and Yoko might well have borrowed from such work during their “Two Virgins” episode. Lennon never shied from paying homage to the Beats and followed the path Ginsberg had led out to India five years before; but then look at the name he gave his band—The Beatles, right?
Ginsberg talks a little about that India journey in this exhibition and we can see why. It’s 1962; India is quieter, less frantic than today. Ginsberg, who’d hit big with his long poem, Howl, had done the unthinkable thing in U.S. consumer culture: he’d dropped out at the height of his celebrity (notoriety?). Having seen how fame was eating up his closest friend Kerouac, he hit the road with Orlovsky, winding up for a long year in India. It was a transformational experience (see Indian Journals, City Lights Books). Joined by fellow poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger (both in show) he travelled widely, lived India deeply and spent months in Benares meditating on the burning funeral ghats along the Ganges. He learned to sing, to chant like the Bengali street poet Bauls, he incorporated mantras in his work. He begin playing the harmonium. He adopted the loose Indian cotton clothes, bells, beads and long hair/beard that identified him throughout his years of public opposition to the Vietnam war. India transformed Ginsberg profoundly; from poet with Old Testament prophetic strains he became bard, chronicler and agent provocateur for a global generation. Returning to the world via Japan and Vancouver’s 1963 Poetry Conference at UBC (some essential photographs are here) he’d emerge as the poet that spooked both the Pentagon and the Kremlin.
From the Hindu and Buddhist forms of meditative practice he encountered in India, Ginsberg evolved his poetic concept of “Aesthetic Mindfulness”—what he frequently explained as “Writing our own mind. Writing down what we see when we see it, what we feel when we feel it.” Partly a return to the Romantic roots of Wordsworth and Blake, it was also a concrete, practical way of building spontaneously on his long-time friend and ally Gary Snyder’s observation that “poetry suddenly seemed useful in 1955 San Francisco.” No longer would it be the dreamy stuff of Sunday afternoon campus tea parties. Poetry and poets had a job to do. From this would come Ginsberg’s epic Howl and all that would follow it—September On Jessore Road, Plutonian Ode, “I Beg You Come Back And Be Cheerful” and the rest. This tremendous photographic exhibition demonstrates Ginsberg’s continual act of mindfulness as poet, friend and political and social activist—the gift of a compassionate augury as antidote to the crisis of meaning and purpose in our time.
Trevor Carolan is the author of Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock (Banff Centre Press, 2001) recounting his studies with the poet at Cortes Island.
