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 one of 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 and cattle ranches south of San Francisco, in what is now Silicon Valley. He bought his first camera in 1957, using money earned delivering newspapers when he was thirteen, and immediately he used that Leica M2 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 for the law firm of Porter and Cahn in Los Angeles, where he provided services in exchange for film, processing, and a press pass to almost any place in the Los Angeles metro area that he wanted to explore. He also photographed musicians performing at The Troubadour in Los Angeles during the late 60s, but he gave most of those photos, along with their negatives, to the artists themselves.

Tranchina’s commercial work included freelance assignments for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday California Living Magazine, Fortune Magazine, and private commissions. His insatiable curiosity and nomadic lifestyle led to work as photographer and researcher for international ethnological studies and analysis focused on AIDs awareness and prevention. His dedication to this cause would transcend his life as a photographer, and he served as a social activist, advocate, outreach worker, and AIDS and Hepatitis C educator around the world from 1986 to 2010, when he relocated to France.

The discovery of Joey Tranchina’s photographic archives brings the artist, poet, and activist’s life full circle. Now, Joey Tranchina’s important archive of Beat-era poets, writers, and the multi-disciplinary artists they influenced will be released by renown art book publisher Steidl Verlag in 2023. Presentation of his photographic archive of Los Angeles in the 1960s is underway, and Tranchina continues to work on a long-term fine art series in France of abstract images drawn from reflections in the canals of Sete, which was exhibited at La Galerie de Photographes in Paris in the summer of 2019.  To see the contemporary fine art series go to:

https://www.lagaleriedesphotographes.fr/collection/joey-tranchina