Harry Smith returned to visit my house, his old room behind him, about a year after he’d migrated upstate to Cooperstown with two dozen boxes of his paintings, books and several hundred hours of tapes he’d made on my Sony Pro Walkman of the ambient sounds of lower Manhattan (climaxing July 4, 1985) – microphone wrapped in towel on windowsill sucking in dog barks & auto horns from the battery to lower East Side for months. Now it is August 30th, 1986.
1986
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
image: 22.5 × 32.8 cm (8 7/8 × 12 15/16 in.) sheet: 27.8 × 35.2 cm (10 15/16 × 13 7/8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Gary Davis
Accession Number
2012.118.67
About the Artist
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), born in Newark, New Jersey, emerged as a multifaceted figure in American culture, best known as a Beat Generation poet but also a prolific visual artist whose photographs, drawings, and prints captured the raw energy of his era. His early life offers little documentation on artistic training, though he attended Columbia University in the 1940s, where he formed connectio...