Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs

Marking the centenary of William S. Burroughs’s birth, this exciting book reproduces the celebrated writer’s many rarely seen photographs. Renowned and highly regarded for his experiments with literature, painting, film, and music, William S. Burroughs was also a prolific photographer. However, his photographic work, consisting of several thousand images, has so far received little critical attention or sustained public exposure. This book reproduces many previously unseen photographs and offers fascinating insights into his photographic practices. It also provides convincing evidence that his photos should be considered a significant aspect of his entire body of work. It includes portraits and self-portraits, location shots from his travels in Europe, the Americas, and North Africa, images of construction and demolition sites, and his individual and collaborative experiments with photomontage, assemblage, and collage. Essays by internationally acclaimed scholars of photography and of Burroughs’s work offer a variety of critical perspectives on his photographic oeuvre, examining its sources, methodologies, biographical contexts, influences, and purposes. Certain to appeal to his many devoted fans, this publication also coincides with a recent revival of critical and cultural interest in the 1960s art scene and the Beat Generation’s writers and artists.