The Beats.

Photographs by Larry Fink.

powerHouse Books, New York, 2014. 96 pp., illustrated throughout, 9½x12".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:

Marco Delogu

Selected as a Book of the Week by Marco Delogu

In the late 50s after an unsuccessful stint in college, master photographer Larry Fink dropped out and began an odyssey of hitchhiking through America. Starting out in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and moving on to Chicago, Larry travelled eastward through Cincinnati and finally back to his native soil on Long Island where his family waited with dismayed but open arms.

Clearly Long Island was not an optimal place for young Fink to remain. Striking out on his own once again, but this time for nearby Beat mecca, New York City, Fink settled down on Minetta Lane with a chap who fancied himself a poet.

Larry was quick to hit MacDougal Street where he met Turk, Mary, Bobbie, Motha, Ambrose, Randy, and Mike Stanley, not to mention Hugh Romney (a.k.a Wavy Gravy), LeRoi Jones, and so many more. Photographing, singing, and smoking weed scored in small brown paper bags on the avenues of the Village, Fink was living with internal rage, infernal optimism, and oh so many new freedoms. Just a kid, Larry yearned to get out and fight the revolution and to photograph while doing so.

The crew lived all together in the sub-basement of the Sullivan Street Theatre. Being next to the Village Gate, a now legendary jazz club, they dug their way to the rear of the club brick by brick to listen to their princes of expressive freedom: John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Art Blakey.

Fink, a Marxist and red diaper baby, didn’t immediately fit in with Turk’s crew, but they needed a young, drug-fueled, jazz-loving (and playing) photographer to document their visionary plight. So, it was decided that Larry sign on—they soon left New York to cross America for Mexico—in search of the soul of the Aztecs, the freedoms of the road, the compulsion of speed, the needy thrust of exaggerated adolescence. They moved fast and hysterically forward…

“It was my fate to be aligned with the Beats because of my propensity for drugs, anger, and poetry. Since they were second generation, without the same sense of immortal obsession such as the like of Kerouac and Ginsberg, they had a distinct need to be documented. Perhaps that is why they tolerated me. We were not a happy marriage and got our divorce in Mexico City. The pictures, made in 1958 and 1959, come from MacDougal Street in New York City all the way down to Mexico, and on the road in America.” —Larry Fink

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