©Harold Chapman - William S. Burroughs, Beat Hotel, Paris 1960-61

Selected Vintage and Period Photographs from 1947 - 2012.

This exclusive exhibition takes us to 9, Rue Gît-le-Cœur and a place nick-named the Beat Hotel. 55 years ago this run-down, 42 room residence in Paris’ Latin Quarter is famed for housing some of the most important writers, poets and artists of the Beat Generation during the mid-20th century.

A guest himself and meticulously documenting the scene, the life and times of his fellow residents, among them William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles, was the much celebrated photographer Harold Chapman. Today recognized as “one of the best photographers of his generation”, Chapman managed to preserve with his images a detailed account of the day -to-day lives of some of today’s most respected minds. It was in that run-down place, as he described it, in front of Chapman’s camera, William S. Burroughs completed his famous Naked Lunchtext, and here that Burroughs began what was to be a lifetime collaboration with artist Brion Gysin. It was at the Beat Hotel that Gysin first conceived the so called Dream Machine. It was here where Patrick Shelley introduced Chapman to Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky and the famous pictures of Ginsberg and Orlovsky are from this first visit to the hotel in December 1957.

Today a four star hotel, the site of this enormous creativity is marked merely by a plaque, dedicated to the most noted occupants. Through Chapman’ s work however, the pioneering spirit of originality and artistic accomplishment lives on and can be revisited at OMC Gallery.