A new show at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles will see Allen Ginsberg in dialogue with two distinct technologies: one of photography, which the late poet engaged with throughout the decades, and the other, entirely of our moment, A.I.  

Ginsberg acquired his first camera, a Kodak Retina, in 1953 and began avidly immortalizing his friends and lovers in pictures. He saw these pictures as “sacramental,” as he wrote in 1993’s Snapshot Poetics, a way of enshrining the spiritual gravitas of William S. Burroughs, say, or Jack Kerouac’s “exquisite… face and gestures.” 

“His photos just have that intimacy with deep reverence and admiration for his friends,” Peter Hale of the Allen Ginsberg Foundation told Artnet News, “which is a major component of his poetry: admiration of and reverence for humanity, a celebration.”

The exhibition, “Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg,” gathers such portraits of his Beat colleagues, including Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Neal Cassady, and Gregory Corso, captured candidly and spontaneously. But it also goes on to trace Ginsberg’s formal evolution as a photographer beyond this early interest.

Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, William H. Gass, Hotel Royal Elevator, Copenhagen, November 1985. Photo: © Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

In 1983, after years of dormancy, Ginsberg renewed his photographic practice by acquiring better equipment on the advice of Robert Frank and Berenice Abbott, and engaging in what he called “continuous reportage.”  

“He basically went from taking a roll or two a year to a roll or two every week!” said Hale. “This period through the late ’80s, I consider his richest, with almost every contact sheet producing something significant.” 

As his fame and friend circle grew, Ginsberg’s images from this era span styles and subjects. There’s a casual group shot at the 1990 Small Press Book Fair, a selfie snapped during an elevator ride with Arthur Miller, a street scene of Keith Haring leaving chalk art on a pavement, and a tender portrait of Patti Smith and Burroughs.

A number of Ginsberg’s photographs further feature his handwritten captions (a custom he picked up from Elsa Dorfman), which fill out the pictures’ contexts and narratives. They were “gems of hyper-compressed information,” said Hale, works of art in themselves that harken back to Ginsberg’s knack for poetic incision.  

As Ginsberg wrote in Snapshot Poetics: “In a sense, writing poems and taking pictures have been two discrete but very closely related activities.” 

Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka with Jayne Cortez, Rashida Ismaili, and friends, Small Press Book Fair, December 2, 1990. Photo: © Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

It’s apt, then, that “Muses & Self” will also unveil a series of poems that have been generated by an A.I. model trained on Ginsberg’s textual and visual output, including his poetry, prose, captions, and more than 400 photographs. 

The collection, titled “A Picture of My Mind: Poems Written by Allen Ginsberg’s Photographs,” has been developed in partnership with theVERSEverse, a Web3 poetry collective, and based on its member Ross Goodwin’s 2018 work, Word.Camera. It is supported by the Tezos Foundation and the Allen Ginsberg Estate.  

“It’s been exhilarating to see the resonances and associations that pop up between seemingly disparate words, images and moments,” theVERSEverse told Artnet News, “to see from a sort of aerial view how all the relationships and personal encounters and sacred moments captured in Ginsberg’s photographs may have filtered into or out of his writings.” 

Built from such a comprehensive ingestion of Ginsberg’s oeuvre, the generated works “speak to us from the past and invite us into the future,” the group added.

The algorithmically generated “Shared Reflections: A Snapshot,” for instance, created in response to Ginsberg’s image, Calcutta Self-Portrait with Peter Orlovsky, 1961, offers: “Who can capture / the fleeting essence / of such a moment, / fragments of the infinite?” 

Allen Ginsberg, Antler, Poet, Brooklyn Bridge, April 7, 1990. Photo: © Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

For his part, Hale has found the A.I. poems “fascinating,” locating them in the tradition of Burroughs’s cut-up experiments. The Beat writers’ choice technique of automatic writing is also echoed in the generative form, theVERSEverse points out. 

While the A.I.-generated poems that make up “A Picture of My Mind” have been edited and curated to keep it “true to [Ginsberg’s] inimitable voice,” theVERSEverse plans to further evolve its generator to reduce the need for such human intervention. Those results are bound for a long-form series planned for the fall alongside generative platform fxhash. 

“We’re essentially turning Ginsberg’s historical photographs into poem machines that allow us not just to read his work but also to engage, interrogate, interact, and continuously create with it,” the collective said. “We’re activating these photos and equipping them to talk back, invite us in deeper, and maybe even reveal things we don’t already know or see.” 

“Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg” is on view at Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 North La Brea, Los Angeles, August 10–September 23.

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Learning more about photography can be a daunting task. There are many options available, from YouTube videos, to conferences and workshops, to personal mentoring options. It can be a little overwhelming in some cases. Where to start? 

Here are some ideas to help you learn more about photography. A little at a time.

What do you want to learn?

If you’re like me, you make lists. Do you have a list of what you want to learn? Great. Choose one item from that list to focus on for this exercise.

Now, create an image of what it is you want to work on or learn through photography.

Maybe it’s a technique, using a new piece of equipment or a different approach to post-processing. It can be anything you want to learn, get better at and work on at the moment.

Will your image be great? Possibly not. But, it will serve as a marker and starting place. It will be a reminder of this one thing that you want to learn to improve your photography. At some point, you’ll be able to go back to this image (or set of images) and see how much you’ve learned.

For example, I want to learn more about my camera’s ability to create in-camera multiple-exposure images. At a recent car show, I practiced this technique throughout the day. It was fun to see the results.

Learn from what you already do

Take a photo on Monday. Think about this image all week. Go back and look at it. Break down what works in it and what you feel doesn’t work. Is it composed properly? Does it tell a story? What is that story? 

On Friday, retake the image and improve on the initial image you created. Take into consideration what you thought about all week. What changes occurred to you that might make it a better image?

This particular example is something that I still don’t seem to have learned: using my tripod! Seriously, it’s one very simple thing you can do to improve your photography.

Take notes from a master

This challenge will have you looking a bit deeper into the history of fine art photography. Edward Weston was one of the pioneers of presenting photography as fine art. 

He has been called “one of the most innovative and influential American photographers” and “one of the masters of 20th-century photography.”

You can find more about him and his photography here.

Take a dive into his portfolio. Make notes about his thought process and what images speak to you. Then create an Edward Weston-like image.

One more example

With so many post-processing options at our disposal, learning a new one can take time. If you’re used to doing things one way you may be hesitant to even try or use a new editing app. So, do it slowly. One slider, one preset, one layer at a time.

My personal learning style is playing and asking what happens if. That’s what I did with the Luminar Neo Magic Light^TM Extention. I just started moving the sliders around to see what happened.

Share what you learned

For each of these exercises, tell us what you did. What was your thought process? How did you improve by doing these exercises?

We’d love to see your results and learn from each other by sharing in the Photofocus Community. Let’s have a conversation about each of these exercises.

DULUTH — Walter Griffin, Dudley Edmondson and I were preparing to wrap up a video call last week. First, though, I had an admission to make. I like cherries, I told Griffin, but the pits frustrate me.

“You could always get a cherry pitter,” said Griffin. “They are available even in hardware stores.” He went on to detail the year’s two cherry seasons, and offered to introduce me to golden-yellow Rainier cherries.

Technically speaking, cherries have nothing to do with Griffin’s profession: photography. For Griffin, though, sharing his love of cherries is a way of building relationships, and relationships are at the core of his work.

“With people, I love to communicate with them,” he explained. “After you’ve communicated with them for a while, then their guard’s let down, and so that’s when you get your best photographs, because then the person is not thinking about you so much, because we have had this interaction.”

A new documentary about Griffin, a short film premiering Thursday at the Zeitgeist Zinema, is titled “The Cherry Man.” It’s a collaboration between Edmondson — a Duluth photographer and filmmaker — and Griffin.

“I don’t know anybody like him, in terms of who’s had as much life experience and being in the right place at the right time,” said Edmondson. “I sometimes jokingly call him ‘Black Forrest Gump,’ in that he just seemed to be right in the right place to capture images and meet people.”

Griffin, 75, and Edmondson, 61, have known each other for about 20 years, said Griffin. Both avid cyclists, they bonded during a drive to Ohio for a bike conference. “We got a lot of time to talk and learn about each other, and listen to some music and (have) a lot of conversation,” Griffin remembered.

“We both enjoy bikes, we both enjoy jazz, we’re both photographers, both Black men, so we had a lot of common ground,” said Edmondson.

As photographers, though, the two have different specialties. Griffin’s work, as seen in “The Cherry Man,” often focuses on human subjects — whether in ordinary moments of contemplation or joy, or in historic moments like U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ return to Selma, Alabama, for the 25th anniversary of the first Selma to Montgomery march.

Edmondson, on the other hand, is best known for his nature photography. It was nature that brought the avid birder to Duluth in 1989; his Northland nature photos have been seen in numerous galleries and dozens of publications. He’s also active as a filmmaker, and travels frequently to guide birding trips and to advocate for outdoors inclusivity.

“With decades and decades, and thousands and thousands of clicks of the shutter and viewing images, you just get to the point where it’s like breathing,” said Edmondson. “You pick up a camera and you just do what you know how to do. Your muscles and brain already know what’s going on.”

“I moved to Minneapolis to work as a photographer” in 1986, said Griffin. “I opened a studio when I got here, and I got entrenched in the fabric of the community. One of the things that I did early on is, I wanted to connect with other Black photographers in the Twin Cities.” He became a mentor and community connector, while continuing his wide-ranging work behind the lens.

“The Cherry Man” highlights Griffin’s longstanding love of jazz. In the film, the photographer shares stories from years when he worked as a concert producer in Indianapolis, booking the likes of Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis. Other music legends photographed by Griffin include Betty Carter and Eddie Harris, a former bandmate of the photographer’s musician brother.

“My whole life has been about photographing people and seeing music,” said Griffin. Lately, though, he’s been spending more time outdoors.

“I’m learning more about nature,” said Griffin. “Now I’m beginning to snowshoe.”

Edmondson went to Minneapolis to interview Griffin on camera for the 18-minute documentary. “The original idea was just to have Walter telling stories and then use cover footage of him making coffee or walking down the street or fiddling around in a dark room,” explained Edmondson.

Because Griffin’s stories were “so visual,” Edmondson realized, “I felt they needed to be illustrated in some way beyond just images of Walter living his life.” The filmmaker turned to historical footage to help establish the context for Griffin’s recollections.

One day-in-the-life sequence did make it into the film, though: We see Griffin shopping for cherries. “I always ask” about a store’s cherry stock, said Griffin, if he doesn’t see the fruit readily available in a produce section. “I know it’s time for cherries, because I know what time of the season the cherries are here.”

Film viewers learn that Griffin first developed his taste for cherries as a boy growing up in Chicago, where his first job was to bag and carry groceries for shoppers who would reward him with perhaps 25 or 50 cents. The young Griffin learned all the produce prices, and knew that cherries were just 7 cents a pound.

Both Griffin and Edmondson are currently working on book projects. “I’m trying to finish up my fourth book,” said Edmondson. “This one is on people of color around the country who are doing environmental things as scientists, as environmental activists and social justice activists, and combining them all in one book.”

For his part, Griffin is working on a career retrospective volume spanning a half-century of his work. But first, he’s coming to Duluth to join Edmondson at Thursday’s screening of “The Cherry Man.”

“It’s Walter’s history, it’s American history, it’s Black history,” said Edmondson about the film. “It’s a combination of all kinds of things through Walter’s eyes and through his stories, and I think that it’s hopefully a film people will enjoy.”

“The Cherry Man” screens Thursday, Aug. 10, at 6 p.m. at Zeitgeist Zinema. The screening is free and open to the public.