Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg

National Gallery of Art | Ginsberg photographed his friends and captured snapshots of his life. His friends just happened to be Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs. This collection of photographs chronicles the lives at the epicenter of the Beat Generation. These guys were hot. They had a hopped-up, creative exuberance that bounce off these prints. Ginsberg captured in these photos, a feeling that a bunch of guys—up for anything—are enjoying life, experimenting with mind-altering substances, pondering their existence, and pushing the boundaries of their conventional time. Very cool.

Kerouac was asked by the editors of a dictionary to define the Beat Generation and described himself and his friends as a group whose members express "a relaxation of social and sexual tensions and espouse anti-regimentation, mystic disaffiliation and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of Cold War disillusionment." There is no reason to expand on that.