Wilshire Center

The Beat Generation’s spirit enters the whimpering late ‘80s via photographs by poet Allen Ginsberg. The black-and-white pictures have the quality of slapdash family album Polaroids enlarged to a fine art format and annotated with Ginsberg’s prosaic, hand-scrawled descriptions. Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Timothy Leary are all recorded here as winsome drug dazed carousers right out of Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

Beat movement was the avant-garde’s rebellion against post-World War II complacency, and took the form, as photos show, of experimentation with drugs, sex and political activism.

A young, fine-featured Leary is seen goofing off in a van; a moody Kerouac smokes pensively on a New York fire escape. A 1947 shot of Ginsberg uncharacteristically hairless and lanky looks out through horn-rimmed glasses. A separate wall of recent shots capturing ‘50s intelligentsia aged and ailing is Ginsberg’s poetic coda on time and change.

Laura Parker tears up Xerox copies of art history images to ape archeological fragments. These peek through an all-over film of sand designs suggesting earth painting or Eastern pattern work. In “Chief of the Royal Farmers” a large almond-eyed face emerges from sand like unearthed artifacts. Conceptual threads make the photos breathe a little but unbuttressed their narrative seems cliche. (Fahey/Klein, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 25).