Nearly a couple years ago I met Larry Keenan via e-mail, and he told me something about his photography history, which has spanned the last several decades and has focused on the Beat and counter-culture movements. After he met Michael McClure in 1965, Keenan was on his way to photograph a large slice of American history. His work has won awards, and been popularized in many publications and performance media.

Larry's a very generous person, for he has allowed me to add two previous galleries to the Beat site. This issue of Jack Magazine features his third gallery, really an extension of the first two; it takes an in-depth photo-look at the same people and places that he was photographing in the 1960s, but in today's eyeball, for many of them--Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bruce Conner, Bob Dylan, and others--are still around and performing, writing, and so forth. Others such as Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso have died fairly recently or in the past few years.

The way Larry works is that he not only takes a picture, he forms the picture into a story. City Lights Bookstore, for instance, has become a legacy. You'll find Larry's photos of it from the 1960s as well as from just recently when the bookstore was declared an historical landmark by the city of San Francisco.

I'd like to thank Larry personally, not only for allowing me to share his work here, but for being profoundly patient during the past six months as I've been putting this issue together.