LEISURE: BEATS, JAZZMEN, ARTISTS IN PHOTOS

Photographer-record company owner Hank O'Neal was a member of the New York artists community back when he would yell up to poet Allen Ginsberg's fourth-floor tenement apartment and Ginsberg would throw down a sock with a key in it.

When he quotes legendary photographer Walker Evans, it's from a conversation the two had.

Music usually is the connection between O'Neal and the subjects of the portraits in his show at the University Museum. O'Neal's record label, Chiaroscuro, has recorded some of the most important jazz artists of the last half of the 20th century.

O'Neal's gallery talk attended by about 40 people Friday was given by a photographer who knew his subjects well and hopes young people won't forget them entirely.

Before a photograph of singer Cab Calloway, O'Neal observed, "This man was very, very, very cool before most people knew what that was."

Writer William F. Buckley was photographed at home playing Bach on the piano. When Buckley saw the photograph he said he could tell he was playing a wrong note.

Ginsberg, seen frequently in the exhibit, wanted to play the harmonium on Bob Dylan's next album, O'Neal said. In another photograph, Ginsberg is seated next to novelist William S. Burroughs and is playfully touching his hand.

O'Neal pointed out a flagrant omission on Cape Girardeau's Missouri Wall of Fame. Burroughs, a St. Louis native who wrote "The Naked Lunch," is considered one of the fathers of the Beat movement of the 1950s.

The now-famous photographers O'Neal knew, people like Evans, Paul Strand and Berenice Abbott, were completely accessible back then.

"It was no harder than picking up a phone and talking to them because no one was paying attention to them in the 1970s," O'Neal said.

O'Neal uses a wooden camera that requires him to cover his head with a black cloth to focus.

"The camera relaxes people," he said. "They are interested in you looking like a fool."