NONFICTION - May 5, 1991

PHOTOGRAPHS by Allen Ginsberg (Twin Palms Publishers: $55; 132 pp.). Poet Ginsberg might not have the eye of Cartier-Bresson or the technique of Ansel Adams, but no one knew the people he did, and his casual photographs, supplemented by hand-written notations and published with enviable handsomeness, capture the romance and excitement of the Beat movement as few other documents have done. Most winsome is a photo of Neal Cassady hugging a girl under a movie marquee announcing Brando’s “The Wild One,” and especially poignant are the shots of Jack Kerouac, first looking young and moodily handsome (above) and then, just before his death, bloated and forlorn.