The Beats

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Publisher's presentation :

"In 1958, at the age of eighteen, the photographer Larry Fink left his childhood home on Long Island and moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village.

Fink was immediately drawn to New York’s counterculture, and he soon met a group of artists, writers, and musicians affiliated with a late stage of the Beat Movement. This group of what Fink calls « delusionary revolutionaries » included the painter and writer Lawrence « Turk » Le Clair and the poets Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Robert Cordier.

Though he shared the hedonistic propensities of these artists, Fink never felt welcome among them, a distance he attributes, in large part, to his Marxism. He has written, however, that the group « desperately needed a photographer to be with them, to give them gravity, to live within them, record and encode their wary but benighted existence. » Fink readily assumed the role.

Not long after he arrived in New York, he travelled with the group on a cross-country trip to Houston and Mexico. Fink wrote « Marxism notwithstanding, I was called to service, to be on the road. » and « It was my fate to be aligned with the Beats because of my propensity for drugs, anger, and poetry. »"

Texts : Gerald Stern, Robert Cordier and Larry Fink.

96 pages - Hardcover

L'Artiere Editions, 2014

New - Mint condition