Last Chance - Allen Ginsberg’s Photos at National Gallery of Art - Review - NYTimes.com

Last Chance - Allen Ginsberg’s Photos at National Gallery of Art - Review - Holland Cotter -NYTimes.com: "The poet Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997, adored life, feared death and craved fame. These obsessions seemed to have kept him, despite his practice of Buddhist meditation, from sitting still for long. He was constantly writing, teaching, traveling, networking, chasing lovers, sampling drugs, pushing political causes and promoting the work of writer friends.

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."

Related Links:

Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery of Art

Leader of the Pack - The New York Times

Leader of the Pack - The New York Times

Jim Lewis for the NYT, "Photography — like music and unlike, say, architecture — is a field that encourages prodigies; Davidson was one. When he was only 23, he was invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson himself to join Magnum Photos, and by the time he found the Jokers, he’d already produced an impressive body of work, including a series on the Lower East Side and a strange, touching portfolio of a dwarf who worked for a traveling circus. Dozens if not hundreds of assignments and projects were to come: pictures of Central Park, of the English countryside, of the civil rights movement and, perhaps most famously, “East 100th Street,” a Jacob Riis-like study of the infamous heart of a New York ghetto."