The

By

Larry Keenan

Interview

B i l l

ect

ric

Photographer Larry Keenan was there to chronicle the great transition from the “Beat Generation”  to the “Hippie Generation”  - taking pictures of artists, musicians, and scene-makers like Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Bob Dylan, Michael McClure, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and more. A selection these photos is in the permanent collection of the Archives of American Artists in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.  That’s enough to make me a big fan, but Keenan has done much more.

Left: Photographer Larry Keenan in Washington, DC for the The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery exhibit, "REBELS: Beat Artists and Poets of the 1950s."       Photo by Lisa Keenan

He is called a "digital pioneer" in the Random House book Digital Photography and has produced a line of Fractal greeting cards. He was featured on the PBS television program Computer Chronicles digitizing and creating the award winning package cover of Deluxe PhotoLab for Electronic Arts using the Amiga 2000 computer system. His photographs are in museums and private collections throughout the world.

Right: Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, photographed by Larry Keenan in 1965

Keenan has received numerous awards and his photographs have appeared in ad campaigns, corporate and professional publications, CD and record albums, books, magazines, and software packages. On top of all that, and to my delight, he is friendly and easy to talk to. Here are some questions I asked him recently. Bill Ectric: How old were you when you started taking photographs? Larry Keenan: I started in the 7th grade. In those days, I wanted to be a cartoonist and/or animator.  My grandfather made me an animation box with the backlight, etc. I drew all the frames for my 3-minute movie.  I used my parents 8mm movie camera to film each frame.  It worked the film was in real animation.  My parents took us to the opening of Disneyland that summer.  While we were down there, my dad had a friend who knew guy in Disney’s orchestra.  He arranged for me to take a private tour to visit the Disney Studios.  There, I met some unhappy animators, who all told me to do something else.  They told me that they were all trapped into doing only their specialty, which might be:  water, clouds, trees, flowers, etc.  They told me there was no variety.   When I got back home a painter at my parent’s remolded kitchen used to work at DC Comics.  He was not encouraging either.

Above: Artist Bruce Conner in 1965 and today, photographed by Larry Keenan

Above: Larry says, "In the Los Altos Hills, in 1969, I was shooting a session with some medical students from Stanford and the Sexual Freedom League illustrating a Ken Kesey project. The basic premise was that the doctors spend all their time at school and in hospitals and are not exposed to the free life in the real world. Kesey felt that they were losing their sensitivity. This unknown old man walked in and sat down on the bench among some people sitting around. Suddenly they all got up, took off their clothes and danced around him. He refused to remove his clothes even when the women pulled at them. Everyone kept asking 'Who is that old man?' "

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