Allen Ginsberg and the march of time.

William S. Burroughs, 1953, © Allen Ginsberg

I didn’t quite expect to confront my own mortality on a lazy Sunday afternoon but that’s exactly what happened after viewing Beat Generation: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery of Art this weekend.

Beat Generation spans four decades in Ginsberg’s life, tracing his rise to literary fame (and notoriety) and capturing his friends and lovers in quiet, quickly snatched black-and-white moments—William S. Borroughs sitting in a chair, his face mostly obscured by shadows, save for a shaft of light streaking behind him; Jack Kerouac smoking on the rooftop of Ginsberg’s apartment building, with a book tucked into his jacket pocket; Gregory Corso sitting in front of a window, flanked by plants. These portraits of literary giants, before they became literary giants, are poignant because we’re looking at these men the way Ginsberg saw them, rather than as flat, historical figures whose works we read in high school and college.

But the most compelling part of the exhibit was the last room, where we see the last two decades of Ginsberg’s life.

Continued...