“It was written in my destiny to belong to ‘The Beat’ because of my propensity for drugs, anger, and poetry.” From “The Beats” by Larry Fink. In 1958, at the age of eighteen, photographer Larry Fink left his childhood home on Long Island and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. Fink was immediately drawn to the counterculture of New York, and soon met a group of artists, writers, and musicians affiliated with a late phase of the Beat movement. This current, which Fink calls “delirious revolutionaries,” included the painter and writer Lawrence “Turk” Le Clair and the poets Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Robert Cordier. Although he shared these artists’ hedonistic tendencies, Fink never felt welcome among them, a distance he attributes largely to his Marxism. He wrote, however, that the group “desperately needed a photographer to be with them, to record and codify their existence, but staying in the shadows, wary.” Fink readily took on that role. Not long after his arrival in New York, he set off with the group on a cross-country trip headed for Houston and then on to Mexico. “Despite Marxism, I was called to service, to be on the road.”