The Beat Poets By Larry Fink

The Beats collects Larry Fink's photographs of the poets, musicians, and drifters he fell in with on Greenwich Village's MacDougal Street in the late 1950s. The pictures sat unpublished for decades before powerHouse Books brought them out in 2014.

Fink dropped out of college and hitchhiked across the country. He went from Cedar Rapids to Chicago to Cincinnati before landing back on Long Island, then struck out again for New York. He settled on Minetta Lane and started photographing the crowd around MacDougal Street: poets, hangers-on, and musicians including LeRoi Jones and Hugh Romney, later known as Wavy Gravy. The group lived together in the sub-basement of the Sullivan Street Theatre, next to the Village Gate. They dug a hole through the wall to listen to John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Art Blakey play next door. Fink later crossed the country again with the same crew, headed for Mexico. powerHouse published the 96-page hardcover with an essay and poem by Gerald Stern and an essay by Robert Cordier. Photographer Mitch Epstein called the book proof that Fink had mastered light and line to capture quiet, energetic interior states even at the start of his career.

Fink went on to build a career photographing social class in America, from Pennsylvania boxing gyms to Manhattan society parties. He always worked close to his subjects, with the same physical and emotional proximity he shows here. The Beats catches him at the start of that instinct, already drawn to people living outside convention.