Larry Keenan, a photographer who captured the Beats in a famed group portrait, died Aug. 12 at his home in Emeryville. Mr. Keenan had Parkinson's disease and suffered a fatal fall in the middle of the night, according to Lisa Keenan, his ex-wife. He was 68.

Mr. Keenan was 22 and still in art school when he was invited to the City Lights bookstore in North Beach to shoot a portrait of Bob Dylan for his upcoming album, "Blonde on Blonde." That picture never made the album, but a picture Mr. Keenan took of all the poets who had come by for the Dylan shoot came to be known as "The Last Gathering."

Mr. Keenan continued to shoot the counterculture for 40 years, while also building a career as a commercial photographer with a studio south of Market Street. He became known for a style of stop-action imagery that was effective for clients such as Levi Strauss, Del Monte, Genentech and Bank of America.

"He could create photographic illusions when nobody else was doing it," says Dale Smith, a creative director and photographer who knew Mr. Keenan for 50 years. "This was all pre-computer, pre-Photoshop. That's what made him extraordinary. If you could imagine it, Larry could produce it."

Lawrence Alexander Keenan Jr. was born Nov. 20, 1943, in San Francisco. His father was a mortician in Alameda and raised his family in a 32-room mansion. Mr. Keenan graduated from Alameda High School, and was cut out to enter the family business, Chapel of the Chimes. When Mr. Keenan announced his preference to be an artist, not an undertaker, he was momentarily disowned, but he still drove a Rolls-Royce from his father's fleet to school at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

He and Smith became friendly with poet Michael McClure, who was on the faculty and had noticed pictures they had made for the school yearbook. "I asked them, 'How would you like to shoot some friends of mine?' " McClure recalls, and that is how they ended up in front of City Lights on Dec. 5, 1965.

According to Smith, who was also there that day, Dylan was in town for a concert and was visiting Allen Ginsberg, who had some of Mr. Keenan's pictures. Intrigued, Dylan agreed to meet the photographer at City Lights.

Owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti put the word out, and on the other side of the camera stood McClure, Robert La Vigne, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan and others who were cut out of the frame on either side. Both Smith and rock photographer Jim Marshall were also shooting, "but Larry's was the best," says McClure, who used the image on the cover of his book "Huge Dreams."

"He knew who the people were and what their center was so they glow out at you," McClure says. "They aren't flat like pancakes. They are real persons."

Dylan was never part of the group photo. There was too big of a crowd, so a separate shoot - with Robbie Robertson, McClure and Ginsberg - took place behind the store, on what is now Jack Kerouac Alley.

The Dylan work from that day, along with the group shot, hangs in a gallery dedicated to Mr. Keenan, along the stairs that lead to the poetry room at City Lights. There is also a picture of Neal Cassady shaving, while describing Kerouac as nothing more than a "good, trophy-winning speed typist."

The Dylan pictures finally made album art 20 years later when he released the boxed set "Biograph," and "The Last Gathering" was blown up to wall size for the exhibition "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965," which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1995. It was later a mural outside the Smithsonian Institution. A portrait of Cassady is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"A good photographer knows which 1/125th of a second is the right one," Smith said. "Larry had a very good sense of the moment."

Mr. Keenan was married and divorced twice. He lived in the Montclair neighborhood of Oakland before moving to Emeryville in 2004, shortly after he started experiencing the symptoms of Parkinson's. He continued to work for commercial clients until 2009, when his symptoms became severe. He never stopped working for the poetry scene that gave him his start.

"He was still doing it when he died," McClure says. "If we had an important event, he would be there in his wheelchair, photographing."

A memorial is pending. Survivors include his daughter, photographer Chelsea Keenan of Clayton, brothers Bob of Visalia and Tim of Lake County, and a sister, Kathy Keenan of Loomis.
