ALLEN GINSBERG, Bob Dylan, 1991, 7.75x11.375" Gelatin silver print, Printed later, Allen Ginsberg Trust copyright stamp signed by trustee, Bob Rosenthal, in pencil on print verso.

"Every writer since the invention of the Kodak has probably made snapshots," says Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, who organized "Beat Memories." Yet very few have amassed a notable body of photographic work. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1991) thus joins Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Eudora Welty and Wright Morris (who's probably better known today for his photographs than for his novels). Ginsberg resumed taking pictures, more seriously, in the early 1980s. He was inspired by the example of an old friend, the photographer Robert Frank, and a new one, the photographer Berenice Abbott.

"What's interesting about Ginsberg is he makes a lot of pictures from 1953 to 1963," says Greenough. "Then it's only beginning in the early 1980s that he rediscovers them. By then he's already established himself as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He can then, if you will, afford to turn his attention to photography. I think photography came at the right moment in Ginsberg's career." Ginsberg began using better cameras and having his photographs printed professionally.

"I had been taking pictures all along," he told an interviewer in 1991, "but I hadn't thought of myself as a photographer." The most noticeable difference was a simple yet distinctive way he found to marry image and text. He began writing captions, sometimes quite lengthy, on each print.. His images, Ginsberg felt, "all had a story to tell, especially the old ones," and his captioning was a way of acknowledging that. Ginsberg's printers had to start making his images smaller to leave room for the words he was writing beneath them - not so much captions, really, as brief excerpts from a running memoir.

Ginsberg spoke of his photographs as his "celestial snapshots." He could as easily have been referring to artistic stardom as the heavens. In addition to shooting fellow Beats, Ginsberg photographed Robert Frank, Bob Dylan, the painter Francesco Clemente and the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The biggest star of all was Ginsberg himself. Not an especially handsome man, he nonetheless had an attractiveness the camera responded to. Frank considered a Richard Avedon nude portrait of Ginsberg and Orlovsky the best photograph the celebrated portraitist and fashion photographer ever took.
Credit: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/allen-ginsbergs-beat-family-album-74767/

Excellent. Minor wear.