Beat generation … Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg in Paris's Place St Germain-des-Prés in 1956 Photograph: Harold Chapman
It was 1956, and I was working in a crummy nightclub in London, waiting on tables, collecting dishes, trying to take photographs. I overheard all these conversations about how fantastic Paris was – "That's where it's at, man," everybody said.
So I hitchhiked there, planning to photograph everything in Paris for a book; a ridiculous ambition – it would have been the size of four telephone directories. At a bookshop called the Mistral, I found the address of the Beat Hotel – though it wasn't called that then. It was just a 13th-class hotel, absolutely rock-bottom quality, at 9 Rue Git-Le Coeur that everybody told me was full of crazy people: poets, artists, writers.
I lived there until 1963, taking photographs with my ancient Compax camera, which I'd picked up in a junkshop. I would pile a load of coats on top of my bed, and dive under them with my developing tank. Then I developed the photographs in the wash basin, and hung the films out to dry with coat-pegs on a piece of string. It was a very haphazard method, and I lost a lot of great photographs to it; but my philosophy has always been to save what is good, and forget what is lost.
Among the many writers I photographed were Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky. One winter day in 1957, they took me for a walk: Ginsberg translated the French street names for me and pointed out the beauty of the architecture. In the Place St-Germain-des-Prés, they decided to sit down on this double-sided bench. I took this picture, just one frame. (I was very economical – film was very expensive.)
Ginsberg and Orlovsky had just moved to Paris, after all the aggravation surrounding the obscenity trial of Ginsberg's Howl. He has this smile of wonderment on his face, as if he's looking into the future, thinking of the voyages around the world he's going to make, the poems he's going to write. Orlovsky has a look of angst. Pessimism and optimism make the perfect balance for a couple to live together – which they did, on and off, for many years.
From the Beat generation, I learned that I could just do anything: they had broken all the rules. I didn't need to worry about composition or anything like that. I based the rest of my life on that understanding. People used to say: "You're crazy – you'll never sell those photographs." But The Beat Hotel has become a cult book. One copy sold several years ago for almost $2,000. So I had the last laugh.
CV
Born: Deal, Kent; 1927.
Studied: "I've had no education whatsoever: I successfully ran away from every school I ever went to. I studied photography just by doing it."
Influences: "The French street photographers – Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Willy Ronis. And Bill Brandt, for his fantastic contrasts."
Top tip: "I can only repeat the advice that Cartier-Bresson once gave me, 'Be honest to your subjectivity.'"
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