“To me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience; hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin."
- Jack Kerouac

scroll

"We heard the word 'beat' spoken on street corners in the village—it meant characters of special spirituality emphasizing a new style for American culture."
- Jack Kerouac, 1957

what are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

- Truman Capote [1924-1984]

Purportedly referring to Jack Kerouac [1922-69]: "That's not writing; that's typing."

black and white

"Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected."

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Robert Frank [born 1924] travelled across post World War II America documenting his adopted country.

though he had been trained in a rigorous Swiss tradition that aspired to photographic perfectionism, Frank's free-wheeling odyssey echoed the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionist art and Beat poetry.

Like Jackson Pollock [1912-1956], he stood in the middle of the picture; he was released from the conventions of traditional picture making.

Jack Kerouac [1922-1969] described Frank's qualities as "agility, mystery, genius and secret strangeness."

  

On The Road, 1959