Gordon Victor Ball

Background

Gordon Victor Ball was born on December 30, 1944, in Paterson, New Jersey, United States. He is a son of Gordon Victor Ball and Daisy Belle Ball.

Education

A grandson of a portrait photographer, Gordon Ball spent his first five years in Parkersburg, West Virginia, then moved to Tokyo, Japan, where he attended the American School. It was there where he got into photography for the first time. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Davidson College, North Carolina, in 1966.

Ball spent a couple of subsequent years hitchhiking with his friend across the United States and Mexico. They lived in a primitive village, and were later arrested without charge (Ball filmed Mexican Jail Footage while incarcerated).

The Master of Arts degree that Ball obtained in 1976 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in American Literature four years later.

Career

Gordon Ball served as an apprentice to moviemaker Jonas Mekas at the age of twenty-one. Through the service, he became acquainted with other United States counterculture icons like Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and Ken Jacobs. From 1968 to 1971, Ball managed an upstate New York farm of the poet Allen Ginsberg with whom he developed a friendship and lifelong working relationship.

Ball's early literary efforts involved editing Ginsberg's journals, his three books, and the Pulitzer Prize nominee Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness. Ball has published three own books including the latest one, East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, issued in 2011.

Besides editing some of Ginsberg's literary and artistic projects, Ball photographed the poet and many of his contemporaries for about three decades. The photographic images have been the subject of many exhibitions that Ball has organized and has taken part in, including a variety of conferences dedicated to the poet and the Beat Generation as well as his own solo shows at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and other art spaces.

Gordon Ball has also realized himself as a moviemaker in his own right and made several films, including Farm Diary, About My House, Father Movie, Enthusiasm, Millbrook, and Do Poznania: Conversations in Poland. The pictures have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, and Virginia Festival of American Film, and distributed by Canyon Cinema and the Filmmakers' Cooperative.

Gordon Ball has tried himself in academics as well. From 1981 to 1985, he taught literature at Old Dominion University and held similar positions at other institutions of the United States, including a four-year professorship at Tougaloo College beginning in 1985. Four years later, Ball joined the professor's staff of Virginia Military Institute where he has served since then. Ball has also taught in Poland and Japan. From 1983 to 1984, in Tokyo, he read lectures on American literature as a Fulbright specialist.

Achievements

• Gordon Ball is an accomplished author, educator, and prolific moviemaker who has issued fourteen independent pictures that have been shown on three continents and at several museums and universities. The movies provided their author with numerous independent awards, including the Pulitzer Prize nomination of Allen Ginsberg’s book Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness which he edited.
  
  Ball’s photos have been reproduced in various periodicals, including the New York Times, Sunday magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Works

More photos

• book

  • On Tokyo's Edge: Gaijin Tales From Postwar Japan

    (These twenty-three short stories reaffirm author Gordon B...)

    2017
  • East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

    (A memoir of the upstate New York getaway where the icons ...)

    2011
  • Dark Music

    (A volume of prose poems by Gordon Ball.)

    2006
  • 66 Frames 1999

• movie

  • Films by Gordon Ball

Membership

Gordon Ball has been a member of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, Canyon Cinema, the Modern Language Association, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Watching Gordon Ball's films is a transcendent experience." Wheeler Winston Dixon
  
  "Gordon Ball 'has accomplished something unique in the autobiographical genre of motion pictures.'" Stan Brakhage
  
  "The poetic parable is Ball's natural territory." Stephen Flinn Young
  
  "Mexican Jail Footage reminds me of standing by the tracks and watching a train go by – it is so strong, it lasts so long, and it is over so quickly." Tom Whiteside
  
  "A unique perspective on a much analyzed but still elusive period – when one awoke every day feeling as if personal revelation and cultural revolution were fully attainable. Ball's youthful intelligence and enthusiasm, and his willingness to labor for little money in musty lofts and tenement apartments, put him at the epicenter of New York's downtown film/art/poetry/music scene. He kept excellent notes." Amy Taubin, movie critic

Interests

• photography

Connections

Gordon Victor Ball married Kathleen Louise Zobel on August 11, 1980. The family produced one child named Daisy Barbara.

Father:

Gordon Victor Ball

Mother:

Daisy Belle Ball

Wife:

Kathleen Louise Zobel

Daughter:

Daisy Barbara Ball

colleague:

Allen Ginsberg