Joey Tranchina is an American photographer from California, whose documentation of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City during the 60s and 70s remained buried in stored boxes for nearly 50 years. The all-but-forgotten archive of thousands of unseen slides and negatives revealed the largest collections of portraits of first, second, and third-generation Beat poets taken by a single photographer. 

Tranchina was raised on his family’s dairy farm, south of San Francisco. He bought his first camera in 1957, using money earned delivering newspapers when he was thirteen, and immediately used it to document a post-World War II generation on the cusp of a counter-cultural revolution. To hone his craft, he worked as a forensic photographer in Los Angeles while going to school, where he provided services in exchange for film, processing, and a press pass to almost any place in the LA area that he wanted to explore. 

Tranchina’s commercial work included freelance assignments for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday California Living Magazine, Fortune Magazine, and numerous private commissions. His insatiable curiosity and nomadic lifestyle led him to work as a photographer and researcher for international ethnological studies and public health. 

The discovery of Joey Tranchina’s photographic archives brings the photographer and poets life full circle. Now, this very important archive is being recognized globally with recent shows in Palm Beach, Paris and Los Angeles with many new events and books in the works.