HAROLD CHAPMAN (1927-)

“I wish anthropologists were capable of noting with as much intelligence and talent [as Chapman] the customs that they study in far-away lands.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a letter

In 1957, the Beat artists and writers converged on a small hotel in Paris; and a young English photographer, Harold Chapman, became the great chronicler of the Beat Hotel and its legendary inhabitants. When the hotel closed in 1963, Chapman moved on but continued to work for high profile publications. He captured the timelessness of market life in France, the lush wine-regions, local life. He documented the psychedelic street fashions of 1960s London, a city that was Europe’s new creative heartland following the breakdown of the Beat lifestyle. Now in his eighties, Harold Chapman’s exhibitions are too numerous to list: from vanishing French landscapes to the Beat Hotel, his work has been shown from Kent to Cape Town, from California to Düsseldorf and some of the best images are about to show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, January to February 2011.

“A photographer of the first rank.”
Ian McEwan, Man Booker Prize winner

Publications include:
Beats à Paris (OMC Düsseldorf, 2000)
The Beat Hotel (gris banal, éditeur, Montpellier/Geneva, 1984)
Everyman’s France (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1982)
Vanishing France (Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co, 1975)
The Complete Guide to London’s Street Markets (Thames & Hudson, 1974)

Click here to view a sample gallery of images from The Beat Hotel by Harold Chapman

Click here to view a sample gallery of images from Harold Chapman