The Beats: Pictures of a Legend by Edmund White

The Beats: Pictures of a Legend

Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 2–September 6, 2010
Catalog of the exhibition by Sarah Greenough
National Gallery of Art/DelMonico, 137 pp., $49.95

Allen Ginsberg’s snapshots of friends—the subject of the exhibition at the National Gallery, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg—are fascinating since few of them are well-known and they often show their subjects in their youth—a fresh-faced, toothy, nerdy Ginsberg, for instance, long before he became the bearded guru, and a melancholy, poetic William Burroughs before he became the saurian undertaker seen in familiar portraits.

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