Item #40803 A b/w photograph by Harold Chapman of a collection of open reel tapes and tape boxes belonging to William Burroughs, stacked together on a shelf in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris. William S. BURROUGHS.
A b/w photograph by Harold Chapman of a collection of open reel tapes and tape boxes belonging to William Burroughs, stacked together on a shelf in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

46.

A b/w photograph by Harold Chapman of a collection of open reel tapes and tape boxes belonging to William Burroughs, stacked together on a shelf in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

No date (probably c. summer 1962). 11x16cm. Signed by the photographer on the verso.

Burroughs began experimenting with tape cut-ups soon after the accidental discovery of cut-ups in writing in 1959. Many of the experiments were made using his own cheap Japanese reel-to-reel tape recorder, often with the help of Ian Sommerville (who later supplied a second machine), resulting in piles of boxes of reels, some of them with the tape spilling out, each one filled with the overdubbed layers of random sounds, recorded speech and radio static.

The photograph may have been taken while Burroughs’ tape recorder was out of action, punched into submission by his heavy-handedness. It appears on page 126 in Chapman’s book, “The Beat Hotel”, and the print (which bears an ink number neatly written in the l/h corner of the upper margin) was probably made sometime before the book’s publication in 1984 (the image was also used for the back cover of the LP “Break Through in Grey Room”, item #30).

Fine.

Sold