Faces of the Beats and Others

Photockai'hs by ANN CHARTERS

Ann Charters has used the camera as an integral part of
her research into the lives and books of American authors
since 1965 when she photographed the landscape and his¬
torical background of the Berkshire writers as part of her
doctoral dissertation Writers in a Landscape. Through¬
out the 1960s she chose the writers of the Beat generation
as her subjects; she photographed Jack Kerouac in Hyan-
nis as part of her research on a bibliography of his publica¬
tions, and she took an extensive series of photographs of
Charles Olson in Gloucester for her book Olson/Melville:
A Study in Affinity. While working on her exhaustive
biography of Kerouac in 1969 and 1970, she made several
trips to California to interview and to photograph those
writers who had known the novelist and poet, now recog¬
nized as among the leading Beat authors. In recent years
Ann Charters has continued to photograph her friends, in¬
cluding the authors Diane di Prima, William Burroughs,
Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso,
and others whose portraits appear on the following pages.
 

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