Allen Ginsberg is an important American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. However, beginning in 1945 or 1946, Ginsberg began shooting photographs as well. By 1953 he started taking photographs regularly, creating portraits of friends and lovers over the years. His “photographic memoir of the Beat era” captures intimate moments with many of the leading writers, poets, and artists who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.