Harold Chapman was born in Deal in 1927. He became world renowned for his documentary pictures of Paris’s Beat Hotel – so-called because of its connection with the writers of the Beat movement such as Allen Ginsberg – and has since worked as a fashion photographer and maintained a keen and abiding interest in the art form.

The exhibition, at Linden Hall Studio, is called Harold Chapman at 90 – Not Only The Beat Hotel.

The collection contains few Beat pictures, in spite of the fact that those images made his name.

Instead, it comprises images captured in and around Deal, where he lives with his wife, Claire, and others from his travels.

The show was the brain child of friend Robyn Bailey West.

Harold said: “The exhibition in Linden Hall Studio is a great idea, and what it consists of are typical photos of my work as a street photographer or itinerant wanderer.

“The photos were rescued when the world turned to digital as all these pictures were chemical prints that I printed myself. So they are all one-off print-only.”

He was introduced to the magic of photography as a child by his father.

Mr Chapman was self-taught and started his career photographing jazz in Soho.

A chance meeting with Vogue photographer John Deakin changed his life. He went to Paris and became a street photographer and was soon working for The New York Times.

In 1957 he moved into the Beat Hotel – then a hotel with no name – on the city’s Left Bank, and lived there until it closed in 1963.

Mr Chapman freelanced, covering fashion shows for American newspapers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune.

He illustrated books for Flammarion, Thames & Hudson, JM Dent and The New York Times, and he freelanced for medical magazines such as Medical World News of New York.

Mr Chapman did picture research for a series of social history books in the 1970s, including Victorian Life in Photographs, Yesterday, and The Home Front with Arthur Marwick, who was professor of history at the Open University.

In 1973, Mr Chapman helped to found Connaissance du Pays d’Oc, a regional magazine in the south of France.

By chance in the flea market in Montpellier, he met a young publisher who went on to publish The Beat Hotel in 1984.

This book became a collector’s item and a second-hand copy was sold by Sotheby’s in New York for $2,250 in 1999.

Returning to Deal in 1993, Mr Chapman photographed Second World War remains in the area around Deal.

In 1997 the Institut Francais d’Afrique du Sud and the British Council joined together to produce a reconstruction of the Beat Hotel in an abandoned factory in Johannesburg. Mr Chapman’s photographs travelled to Cape Town, where the entire exhibition was bought by The OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art in Duesseldorf, resulting in another book – Beats a Paris.

In 2003, OMC Gallery lent Jim Haynes, the creator of London’s Arts Lab, an exhibition of Beat Hotel photographs.

In 2010 the Proud gallery in Chelsea showed photos from the Beat Hotel in a major exhibition organised by the picture library TopFoto.

And a film called The Beat Hotel, directed by Alan Govenar of Documentary Arts, was released in 2012.

A new chapter of travelling exhibitions and retrospectives about the Beats mean that Mr Chapman’s work has for several years been shown in Europe and the States, including at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2016.

Mr Chapman is still working at the age of 90, currently on pictures of Les Halles market in Paris from his extensive archive.

Booker Prize-winning British novelist Ian McEwan says: “If Chapman were merely a chronicler in a great documentary tradition, his achievement would be impressive enough.

“His lustrous landscapes of the Herault valley in the Languedoc, his priceless record of the Beat Hotel, his omnivorous, year-on-year transcription of daily life and its little undercurrents would ensure his reputation as a photographer of the first rank.

“But it was constructive paranoia that made him an artist.”