LAUNCH | “EN AMÉRIQUE” BY ALAIN DISTER

THURSDAY OCTOBER 13, 2022 from 6 to 9 P.M.

From the 1960s to the early 2000s, Alain Dister documented the American counterculture as a rock critic, writer and photographer.
This largely unpublished dive into Alain Dister’s archives unfolds the stylistic path of his documentary work to offer a vivid portrait of American society and its youth over nearly half a century.

“Photography, a hand stretched out towards the other, [was] a guide to try to understand this disruption of the senses of a whole society – while at the same time integrating itself with happiness. I didn’t feel like I was doing a reporter’s job. Rather, I was writing, in images, a travel diary, with its friendships, its transitory places of life, the daily life of the street, the memories of concerts. […] Like a flash of light on the retina, the dazzled vision of these hippie days never completely faded away.”

From backstage concerts to hippie communities, from vast landscapes to urban interstices, Alain Dister was interested in everything that escaped the light of the official spotlight.
His gaze, graphic and singular, was that of a man curious about his time, in search of sharing, that of a “cultural ferryman”, between countries and between generations. Free and lucid. Always on the lookout for new developments. Attentive to the horizon on which his meetings appear. Always fraternal, an eye on the margins. The beat spirit gives him a certain “state of travel”. He thus brings back from America a pictorial chronicle, punctuated with backstage meetings with future rock stars still surprisingly accessible, but also with the “invisible”, along the Californian and New York sidewalks, and the transcontinental roads…