Lot 134: Selected Images from The Beat Hotel, 1957-1963

Selected Images from The Beat Hotel, 1957-1963
Twelve gelatin silver prints. Varying in size from 15.2 x 22.8 cm. (6 x 9 in) to 16.2 x 21.9 cm (6 3/8 x 8 5/8 in) or the reverse.  Each signed in ink in the margin; one signed in ink, one signed in pencil on the verso; variously stamped and annotated all on the verso. Accompanied by the book, H. chapman, The Beat Hotel, 1984, signed in ink on the title page.

  Gris Banal, The Beat Hotel, 1984, various pages

 Acquired directly from the artist

The “Beat Hotel” was a place of eccentrics, prostitutes and artists. It was a dirty cheap hotel on Rue Gît-Le-coeur in the city’s Latin Quarter that has now become synonymous with creativity and a metaphor for 60s Paris. Winding up meeting the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, the English photographer Harold Chapman left his job as a waiter to hitchhike to Paris and immerse himself in the heart of this new-found community successfully enough to photograph its transient inhabitants.