Harold Chapman

Of his background, upbringing and childhood years, the photographer Harold Stephen Chapman has revealed only that he was “born in Deal on a Saturday morning at 9.30am on 26 March, 1927.” Deal is a quiet seaside town in the county of Kent, on the south coast of England.

In the more than 80 years since, he has produced a vast body of work. Yet the renown of Harold Chapman – better known simply as Chapman – remains inextricably linked to a period of less than a single decade. From the mid 1950s to the early 1960s he lived in a backstreet Left Bank guesthouse in Paris later nicknamed (by Verta Kali Smart) ‘the Beat Hotel’. There Chapman chronicled in detail the life and times of his fellow residents – among them Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other great names of Beat Generation poetry and art.

When the Beat Hotel finally closed its doors in 1963, Chapman was the last guest to leave. The extraordinary collection of photographs he had taken there were to become the mainstay of his reputation, a unique record both artistic and historic.

Yet increasingly his other work attracts worldwide attention, and could yet prove a greater legacy. Portraits, landscapes, bizarre objets trouvés and, especially, distinctive enigmatic street scenes (often involving incongruous background advertising), combine his two characteristic emotions – pervasive moody anxiety and quirky wit.

Career

Harold Chapman’s work spans four stages.

He began his career working freelance for local, regional and national newspapers and magazines in the UK. In 1954, a chance meeting with photographer John Deakin (Vogue, The Observer) marked a turning point. In that year Chapman moved to Paris to work as a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue.

In 1957, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg surprised the literary world by abandoning San Francisco and turning up in Paris with Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso. They took rooms in the lodging house at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that was to become known as the Beat Hotel. Chapman moved in at about the same time, and took pictures constantly. Here he met his future first wife. In addition to the Beat Hotel pictures, numerous striking street scenes were taken in the same period.

When the hotel closed in 1963 Chapman moved, together with London book dealer "Cyclops" Lester, to the Languedoc region in southern France. At first he continued to cover fashion for the New York Times and others, and documented hip street fashion in ‘60s London. He contributed as a freelance to many French, American and British newspapers. Increasingly, during the ‘70s and ‘80s, he also established himself as a brilliant landscape photographer, producing sumptuous and evocative scenes of Languedoc which, even when full of light, yet possessed his characteristic sense of hidden darkness. He was co-founder of the Languedoc regional magazine Connaissance du Pays d’Oc.

In 1993 he returned to his childhood home, Deal, even living in the same house. He has a fascination with wartime coastal defences, and earns his living taking pictures of local events and views.

Recent exhibitions

2008 International Contemporary Photography
Jan 26 - Feb 23,2008, at: The OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art, 7561 Center Ave., Huntington Beach, California, USA.

2007 Harold Chapman 80th birthday celebration
Friday 29th June to Thursday 12th July: The Royal Hotel, Deal.This exhibition in Chapman's home town showed some of his most famous works.

2007 Harold Chapman – Photographer: A Retrospective 1947-2007
23 March-24 April: The OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art, 7561 Center Ave., Huntington Beach, California.

2007/2008 Harold Chapman at 80 - An online retrospective
A Gallery exhibition of Chapman's work for the Top Foto agency, at [http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/HaroldChapman/default.htm Harold Chapman Gallery]

Comment and Reflections

Allen Ginsberg, remembering the Beat Hotel - “In the attic there was a photographer who didn’t talk to anybody for two years.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a letter (1975) - “I wish anthropologists were capable of noting with as much intelligence and talent the customs that they study in far-away lands.”

Françoise Brégit, L’Independant (1979) - “In the tradition of Cartier-Bresson, Chapman is a witness on the lookout for the abnormal in everyday life.”

Ian McEwan, author, in an article for The Guardian (2000)
"The now best-selling author Ian McEwan, winner of the Booker Prize, was one of the Languedoc group who first met Chapman in the early 1970s. In a lengthy article about Chapman, 'A Spy in the Name of Art', published in The Guardian on 29 April 2000, McEwan writes:"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."

Andrew Sanger, travel writer, interviewed (2007) - "I first met Chapman in the early 1970s while living in a nearby village in the Languedoc. He had a simple old three-storey stone house in a narrow dead-end alley in the heart of the tiny village of St Guiraud. Dark, precipitous stairs climbed to the living area on the first floor. There we would sit around the small bare wooden table and share pot after pot of strong coffee, look through his latest work, talk about the past and the future, and I would fall under the spell of his mesmerising, almost paranoid understanding of society, hear about the frightening world of magic and mystery that he saw and felt all about him, and, also, learn immense amounts about the region we were living in.
“He was separated from his first wife and certainly it did cross my mind that she must have found him terribly hard to live with. But after a while he had a new and quite different companion, Claire Parry, whom he later married and has remained with ever since. Curiously, their house in Deal – an ordinary brick terraced house - has something of the same feeling as St Guiraud – cramped, intense, a whole world in a tiny space.”

Picture of Chapman by Claire Parry

Books

Beats à Paris (Michael Kellner,Hamburg and OMC Communication GmbH, Duesseldorf 2001) – by Harold Chapman
The Beat Hotel (Editeur banal gris, 1984) – by Harold Chapman, foreword by William Burroughs, foreword by Brion Gysin.
Everyman’s France (J.M.Dent, 1982) – by Maxine Feifer (Author), Harold Chapman (Photographer)
Vanishing France (Quadrangle, New York, 1975) – John Hess, Harold Chapman.

External links

* [http://www.topfoto.co.uk/email/haroldchapman/haroldchapman.html "www.topfoto.co.uk"] - Top Foto, agency with over 3000 Chapman pictures.
* [http://www.omc-llc.com/gallery_e.html "www.omc-llc.com"] - OMC Gallery, exhibitors of Chapman's work in Germany and USA.
* [http://www.thebestofdealandsandwich.co.uk/haroldchapman.html "www.thebestofdealandsandwich.co.uk"] - Chapman’s recent pictures of Deal, Kent.
* [http://www.theimageworks.com "www.theimageworks.com"] - US agency for Chapman photos