The photographer (1943-2012) lived with his parents when he was asked to shoot a Bob Dylan album cover in 1965. Since Bob Dylan was friends with Allen Ginsberg and other beat poets, his parents were less than pleased that their son would hang out in such “bad company” (which subsequently became the title of one of his works). They asked him to mow the lawn, or they wouldn’t lend him their car to drive to San Francisco for the shooting. He did it, and while he did, he nervously focussed on the fact that he was about to document some very important events. The pictures he took on that day are some of his most famous work, he shot “the last gathering of the beats”, about all of the remaining beats hanging out in front of city light book, an independent bookstore that is still open today and was declared a historic landmark.
Larry Keenan documented counterculture life in beautifully shot black and white pictures. Just look at this one, it fills us with “sentiment and longing”, as Jack Magazine stated (same link, the magazine closed in 2010). It really does – allow me to digress, I just read a few works by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and read about their lives. I was astonished what a small role women played, or how bourgeois things were asked of them, without anyone noticing any hypocrisy. I was especially interested in Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady’s wife, who took part in beat culture, dutifully raised children, and then built up an impressive career – a story for another time. Anyway – I look at Keenan pictures, they make me nostalgic somehow, lingering questions or not.
Larry Keenan followed the beats and counterculture movements of the next decades as a silent observer – he didn’t agree with their lifestyle. He worked as a high school teacher before he started his own business as a professional photographer. He worked until 2004, when a chronical illness forced him to retire.
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