Ginsberg exhibit soon to beat it

Rebecca Ginsberg, Buba, wife of Pincus, laundry-man..." Allen Ginsberg; Courtesy of Gary S. Davis

Allen Ginsberg was also, it develops, a photographer. Quite a good one. If you live in the D.C. area, you have until Thursday to see "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at the National Gallery. If you live far from the D.C. area, you have until Thursday to buy a plane ticket and see "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at the National Gallery.

Ginsberg took photos throughout the second half of the twentieth century, capturing Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, and other cultural giants he knew well. In the New York Times, Holland Cotter writes:

In the early 1950s he began to photograph these friends in casual snapshots, meant to be little more than souvenirs of a shared time and ethos. Years later his picture taking — often of the same friends, now battered by life or approaching death — became more formal and artful, as if he were trying to freeze his subjects’ faces and energies, and to show off his photographic skills, for the history books....As arranged by Sarah Greenough, the senior curator in the museum’s department of photographs, they form a continuous narrative. In the space of two small galleries we watch legends take shape, beauties fade, an American era come and go.