DC Museumgoer

It’s only May, but I have a feeling this exhibit may make my top five this year.

Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg opened today at the National Gallery of Art, and while I was never a big fan of “Howl,” I gotta admit the poet’s got an eye for people. The show consists of 79 black and white photos, most of which are portraits of that troubled but visionary tribe: Ginsberg himself, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso.

The shock of the show rests in two very different photos of Jack Kerouac, taken a decade apart. The first, from 1953 (above), shows a confident young man rambling around New York’s Lower East side; the second, from 1964, shows the writer slumped in a chair in Ginsberg’s apartment. Ginsberg notes, in a crabbed, handwritten caption, that Kerouac looked like “his old man” by this point: red-faced, corpulent, and shuddering.

It’s an accurate description. Kerouac looks like he’s aged 30 years.

There’s real innocence in Ginsberg’s photos from the early 50s, however: the then-unknown Beats look fresh-faced and full of bravado. He deftly captures that moment in early adulthood when all paths lay open, compromises have yet to be made.

It’s a moment I was thinking about just yesterday, after reading this lengthy NYT Magazine piece on young, idealistic Obama aides living the dream in Logan Circle. I e-mailed my best friend about it, reminding her of our own group house days on Jenifer Street in Northwest DC. “Those days are long gone,” she said.

Our challenge is not to become jaded.

Beat Memories runs through September 6, 2010.