Like every true New Yorker, Kate Simon is…British. A major witness to an incredible time (the ‘70’s), she was a friend to the poets, writers, and rock stars of the underground, those creatures lurking in the shadows, yearning for light. She has extraordinary and rare photographic memories of the time.
For the exhibition at the Renoma café, “The Beat Generation, from Kerouac to James Dean”, she opened her treasure chest, offering some unreleased photos of one of the masters of the extreme, William Burroughs, published in France by Christian Bourgois, a literary explorer and talent hunter.
In constant poetic overdrive, Burroughs functioned with hard drugs, playing with his life and that of others (he was passionate about weapons. A word sculptor dressed like a seminarian, skinny and worrisome behind his eternal glasses, lost on white powder way, he exaggerated his own persona when posing for pretty Kate. 12 pictures of him looking like a cold killer or a Satanic pastor, waiting, a rifle on his knees. His only faithful companion, an old typewriter on his desk: a dark and heavy confrontation, painful, witnessed by this, one of the exhibition’s most beautiful pictures.
In her contribution to the exhibition, Kate Simon offered a few other shots of a young poet with a fiery glance in the same vein as William B: Patti Smith, a creature of the New York underground like her friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Because W.B., poet Allen Ginsberg and writer Jack “On the Road” Kerouac, are the mythical faces of the Beat Generation. Patti Smith became a rock star, Robert Mapplethorpe died, and artist Keith Haring, also gone, poses alongside W.B. They are but a small fraction of Kate Simon’s gallery of portraits: the memory of these avant-garde rockers and artists from 1970’s underground New York.
In progress, a retrospective book about this devoted photographer.
From Michael Jackson to Damien Hirst, Paul Getty and Louise Bourgeois, Bob Marley (exceptional documents), Madonna, Iggy Pop, Dennis Hopper etc… nothing but beautiful people.
Paul Alessandrini
The Beat Generation : from Kerouac to James Dean
Until June 22
Renoma Café Gallery
32 Avenue George V
75008 Paris
