Allen Ginsberg Photographs to the University of Toronto

A giant collection of some 7,500 Allen Ginsberg photographs have been donated by the Larry and Cookie Rossy Family Foundation to the University of Toronto, which announced the gift in January. They now reside there in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and some have been made available online.

According to the University's press announcement:

"The Ginsberg prints provide visual insight into New York urban landscape from the 1950s to the 1990s. They also document Ginsberg’s international travels to Canada, France, India, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, the USSR and many other nations."

Here's a photograph that is not in their collection, taken January 21st, 1986 upon arriving at the Sandino International Airport in Managua. Ginsberg, Pedro Pietri and a group of North American writers and artists (myself included) had been invited to participate in an "invasion of poets" for the 1986 Ruben Dario Festival.

Pedro Pietri, Ernesto Cardenal, Allen Ginsberg
Sandino International Airport, Managua
January 21, 1986

Beat Memories - The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg

The National Gallery of Art hosts an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg's photographs, May - September.

"Drawing on the most common form of photography, the snapshot, he created spontaneous, uninhibited pictures of ordinary events to celebrate and preserve what he called "the sacredness of the moment."

Ginsberg's interest in photography was not casual, not a passing hobby. In many ways, the practice of photography augmented his poetry. Both art forms, as practiced by Ginsberg, merged the visual with the autobiographical. As he wrote in the Author's Preface to Collected Poems 1947-1980, "Herein author has assembled all his poetry books published to date rearranged in straight chronological order to compose an autobiography."

His photographs, many uniquely and extensively captioned by hand, augment and extend the autobiographical record. Primarily portraits, they depict a multitude of friends and acquaintances - artists, writers, scholars, boyfriends, family members - spanning the second half of the 20th century. They are not consciously 'arty' but are, like his poetry, deliberately visual and richly detailed. If Ginsberg is, as Bill Morgan asserts in The Typewriter is Holy, the Beat Generation's bonding agent, the one person whose effort, vision, and conviction is primarily responsible for scholars and readers being able to talk about a 'Beat Generation' today, then Ginsberg's photographs are unequivocally the most important visual record we have of that literary circle.

(Allen Ginsberg, Managua, Nicaragua 1986, photograph by Patrick Warner)