Allen Ginsberg. Jack Kerouac wandering along East 7th street …, 1953. Gift of Gary S. Davis © The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.

Chronologically, one of the last images in Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, is a portrait of Bob Dylan taken in New York’s Tompkins Square Park in 1992. This one photo demonstrates what’s great about this exhibit, but also what’s problematic about it. On the one hand: it’s a picture of Bob Dylan made by Allen Ginsberg, one of the great voices of the counterculture as seen by another, a pair of aging veterans of a scene which by then had become positively mainstream, if not thoroughly commodified. But is it the visual art, or the cultural gravitas, that makes this an great photograph?

That question comes up a lot during this show, which begins with snapshots Ginsberg made with a $13 Kodak Retina that he bought at a Bowery pawnshop in 1953. (And really, doesn’t that detail alone add a whiff of history to the photos, regardless of who took them?) Ginsberg shot Jack Kerouac (and Neal Cassady) before On the Road was a twinkle in his eye, William S. Burroughs (briefly Ginsberg’s lover) before Naked Lunch, Carl Solomon before he made a cameo appearance in Howl … you get the idea. If you have any interest in the Beat authors this is a fascinating show.