Harold Stephen Chapman (26 March 1927 – 19 August 2022) was a British photographer noted for chronicling the 1950s and 60s in Paris.
[1] He produced a large body of work over many years, with his most significant period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, when he lived in a backstreet Left Bank guesthouse in Paris later nicknamed (by Verta Kali Smart) ‘the Beat Hotel’.
There he chronicled in detail the life and times of his fellow residents – among them Allen Ginsberg[1] and Allen's lover Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other great names of Beat Generation poetry and art.
The collection of photographs he had taken there provide an artistic and historic record, and became the mainstay of his reputation.
Chapman's other works attract worldwide attention, and include portraits, landscapes, bizarre objets trouvés and, especially, distinctive enigmatic street scenes (often involving incongruous background advertising) that combine his two characteristic emotions: pervasive moody anxiety and quirky wit.