Poetry News
Originally Published: May 06, 2010Ginsberg Photographs on Display at the National Gallery
Allen Ginsberg is best remembered as a poet. In the 1950s and '60s he was the spokesman for a generation of disenchanted misfits who came to be known as the Beats. They were in bars and on rooftops and on the road; they listened to jazz, lost sleep over literature, got in trouble. It was a small and elite band of — mostly — boys, and Ginsberg was at its center.
But more than a writer, Ginsberg was a bearded, Buddhist, flower-powered Renaissance man. He was a political activist, a connoisseur of soups and, through it all, a photographer. On May 2, the first-ever scholarly exhibition of his photographs opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.