Fred McDarrah, Vintage Silver Gelatin Photograph Lawrence Lipton Photo Beatnik Beat Writer, 1965

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Lawrence Lipton May 17 1965
photographer Fred McDarrah

Over a 50-year span, McDarrah documented the rise of the Beat Generation, … Read more Lawrence Lipton May 17 1965
photographer Fred McDarrah

Over a 50-year span, McDarrah documented the rise of the Beat Generation, the city’s postmodern art movement, its off-off-Broadway actors, troubadours, politicians, agitators and social protests.
Fred captured Jack Kerouac frolicking with women at a New Year’s bash in 1958, Andy Warhol adjusting a movie-camera lens in his silver-covered factory, and Bob Dylan offering a salute of recognition outside Sheridan Square near the Voice’s old office.
Not just a social chronicler, McDarrah was a great photo-journalist.
For years, McDarrah was the Voice's only photographer and, for decades, he ran the Voice’s photo department, where he helped train dozens of young photographers, including James Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Robin Holland and Marc Asnin. His mailbox was simply marked "McPhoto."
An exhibit of McDarrah’s photos of artists presented by the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea was hailed by The New York Times as “a visual encyclopedia of the era’s cultural scene.”
artists in their studios, (Alice Neel, Philip Guston, Stuart Davis, Robert Smithson, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline), actors (Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro on the set of “Taxi Driver”), musicians (Janis Joplin, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan) and documentary images of early happenings and performances (Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, Al Hansen, Jim Dine, Nam June Paik). The many images of Andy Warhol include the well-known one with his Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964. Woody Allen, Diane Arbus, W. H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Joan Baez, Louise Bourgeois, David Bowie, Jimmy Breslin, William Burroughs, John Cage, Leo Castelli, Christo, Leonard Cohen, Merce Cunningham, William de Kooning, Jim Dine, Mark di Suvero, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Indiana, Mick Jagger, Jasper Johns, Kusama, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Elvis Presley, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Lou Reed, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, and others. McDarrah’s prints have been collected in depth by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. His work is in numerous public and private collections.

Lawrence Lipton (October 10, 1898 – July 9, 1975)[1] was an American journalist, writer, and beat poet, as well as the father of James Lipton.

Life and career
Lipton was born in Łódź, Poland, the son of Rose and Abraham Lipton. He was brought to the United States in 1903 and settled in Chicago, Illinois. Lipton began working as a graphic artist and won an award for his illustration of a version of the Haggadah, a Passover prayer book. He also worked as a journalist, writing for the Jewish Daily Forward and working for a movie theater as a publicity director.
During the 1920s, he associated with Chicago writers Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Harriet Monroe, Ben Hecht, and Carl Sandburg. Lipton later wrote for Atlantic Monthly, The Quarterly Review of Literature, and the Chicago Review. Lipton co-authored many mystery novels during the 1930 and 1940s. His other novels include Brother, The Laugh Is Bitter and In Secret Battle, as well as a poetry book, Rainbow at Midnight. His book, The Holy Barbarians (1959), linked Lipton to the Beats. He appeared in The Hypnotic Eye (1960) as "King of the Beatniks".

In the episode "Swan Song" on the show Gilmore Girls, Rory is showing Jess her copy of The Holy Barbarians by Lipton, and says that he is "the father of the guy that does those Actors Studio interviews on TV", to which Jess responds "It’s weird that a beatnik guy would have a conservative son like that." Lipton's first wife was Dorothy Omansky. He next married Betty Weinberg, a teacher; their son is Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton. He was later married to author Craig Rice and Nettie Esther Brooks (from 1948 to 1975). See less