The Beats in Pictures

New photographs in which Allen Ginsberg captured his fellow Beats—Kerouac, Corso, and himself—have been unearthed by scholars, enriching the American Beat catalog. “Oddly, Ginsberg’s photographs sat for decades in closets and drawers, then in the tombs of a Columbia University archive. But when scholars finally descended on them with their lamps and spectacles, they found something magnificent. With his secondhand Kodak Retina, the poet had surreptitiously illustrated not only his energetic generation, but his own oeuvre, leaving behind a catalog of images to reawaken the euphoric thesis that he’d scribbled across the arch of his lifetime: namely, that sex and poetry and the ‘cosmic vibrations’ of youth and life are way, way awesome.”