From the Exhibition Catalogue

Now that I have since bought the exhibition catalogue for the Beat Memories exhibit, I have photos!  It is great to not have to go searching on the internet for compromised quality photos.  The photo accompanying the blog title is perhaps one of my favorites of Ginsberg’s.  Unfortunately I’m not sure how, or if, I’ll even be using it in my thesis, but it is a truly wonderful image.  The contrast between darks and lights, the composition, the moment of suspension, the gaze if all really beautiful.

I am including other photographs that I have a certain affinity for.  More to come, but just for you to have a sense of Ginsberg's work.

Title Change

I have finally found a more suitable title for this project!  Everything about this thesis has felt hap-hazard in its process, but now that the quarter is finally nearing its end, I will be able think seriously about my thesis and devote more time to it.  It also helps having to write a paper for my Perspective class as a spring-board.  Work between my Perspective class as well as my Professional Practices class has allowed for a sliver of contemplation. 

"Behind the Lens" was a suggestion from a professor as a title, when I presented my research thus far.  Though I like that it is immediate and effective, it does not account for Ginsberg's poetry, but seems to limit the reader's idea of the paper strictly to his photography. While working on the "spring board" paper I found the words, "Elusive Exposure," which I really like. My thesis is dealing with the sense of loneliness and alienation from these photographs and Ginsberg's process of coming to terms with his identity. The process appears "elusive" at times with his multiple portraits in which he uses reflection and double reflection. In the end, he is trying to "expose" himself by unveiling who he is, how he can understand himself. The duality of the word also lends to his nude self portraits.

So as of now, the working title for the thesis, as well as this blog, is "Elusive Exposure: The Photography and Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (an Undergraduate Thesis)" It is lengthy, but the parenthetical also further clarifies my intent for keeping up with the blog and make use of it in regards to my senior thesis. In the end, I hope this blog will act as, at the very least, a conglomeration of information in regards to Ginsberg, a well for people to delve into for information on him. Of course, there is so much information out there on Ginsberg, what with his extensive attempts to preserve his memory and the work of his biographer, Bill Morgan, but i hope that this will provide a condensed version and incorporates his photographs in a new way, in the way that Sarah Greenough (senior curator of photography at the National Gallery, D.C.) accomplished in her exhibit Beat Memories.

The title "Internal Hammers" was the initial title that just didn't go along with the thesis in any real way. It is a term as well as an idea I created in my poetry, and therefore I am switching it to my second blog, which will cater to my own creative work: my poetry, visual art as well others in my exploration and experimentation with the written word and visual art, how they respond to one another -- a conversation, so to speak, between the literary and the visual.

Coming Soon!  More Ginsberg photographs from the exhibition catalogue...