#thebeathotel

Harold Chapman was born in Deal in 1927.  As a child, his father introduced him to the magic of photography.  Harold was self-taught.  He started his career as a jazz photographer in Soho.  Meeting Vogue photographer, John Deakin, changed his life.  He went to Paris and became a street photographer and was soon working for The New York Times.  In 1957 he moved into the Beat Hotel – then a hotel with no name – on the Left Bank and lived there untill it closed in 1964. By chance in the flea market in Montpellier, he met a publisher, Francois Lagarde, who went on to publish The Beat Hotel in 1984. 

How would you describe your photography practice?

I am a street photographer which gives me a chance to avoid getting into crowds which I do not like particularly like, but like to be working alone.  The pictures that I take are the messages that I see visually in the world today and I take them to show those who look what I believe the world is becoming...

What it is you want to say with your photographs?

My photographs should make people giggle and then think twice and maybe even thrice!

How do you actually get your photographs to do that?

The photographs are a juxtaposition of various objects and situations in the streets which come together by chance. 

How do you develop ideas?

I develop ideas by lying flat in bed and thinking and trying to create dreams.  Unfortunately the dreams are now becoming reality so it's good to show how things used to be...    

Who has influenced you the most?

From a technical point of view and also philosophical, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Do they influence your thinking and your practice?

Very much so. 

What dreams and goals inspired you to succeed?

I was inspired to succeed by meeting John Deakin, the well-known fashion photographer of Vogue.  However, he said he always considered himself a street photographer and advised me to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and go to markets... and photograph the hardness of an ashtray and a guy digging his chick...  A few days later, I happened by chance to see an exhibition of his, under a bookshop and coffee bar in Soho, called My Paris...  I had never seen such stark and bleak grainy photographs...  I was soon on my way to Paris where I learned my trade on the streets...

Harold Chapman Deal Kent

The Beat Hotel

The Beat Hotel was a place of eccentrics, prostitutes and artists. It was a  cheap hotel on Rue Gît-Le-coeur in the city’s Latin Quarter that has now become synonymous with creativity and a metaphor for 1960s Paris. When the Beat Hotel closed its doors in 1964, Chapman was the last guest to leave. The collection of photographs he had taken there provide an artistic and historic record of the period including Brion Gysin and William Burroughs.

Brion Gysin with the Dream Machine Paris 1960

Madame Rachou, Proprietor of the Beat Hotel, William Burroughs, Paris 1960

Harold Chapmans’ other works include portraits, landscapes, bizarre objets trouvés and, especially, distinctive enigmatic street scenes (often involving incongruous background advertising) that combine his two characteristic emotions: pervasive moody anxiety with quirky wit.

Oxford Street 1970

Booker Prize-winning British novelist, Ian McEwan says:                                       “If Chapman were merely a chronicler in a great documentary tradition, his achievement would be impressive enough. His lustrous landscapes of the Herault valley in the Languedoc, his priceless record of the Beat Hotel, his omnivorous, year-on-year transcription of daily life and its little undercurrents, would ensure his reputation as a photographer of the first rank. But it was constructive paranoia that made him an artist.”



Harold Chapman once my mentor and tutor in Deal, Kent. Both Ricoh addicts and Lomo freaks! Still going strong.