Alain Keler : « America Americas »

America Americas is a treasure trove!
Taking advantage of the confinement, Alain Keler went back into his archives and discovered films that had never been developed. They date from his youth in New York, where he had gone to follow his love. It was in 1971, Alain was 26 years old and arrived with a suitcase under his arm and images of the greats in mind: Cartier Bresson, Winogrand, Wegee, Strand, Lewis Hine... He greedily photographed his adopted city, made a foray into Washington during Richard Nixon's second inauguration, and found himself at the heart of the protests and celebrations. His gaze sharpens, confronts the street, the crowds, the daily life of New Yorkers, in Coney Island, Manhattan or Little Italy with, already, the tenderness and empathy of the gaze that we know him.
Young Alain's dearest wish was to become a professional photographer. One day, he gets an appointment with John G. Morris, the legendary director of photography of the New York Times, who tells him about his work "it's not very exciting"! Twenty-six years later, John Morris called him to tell him that he had won the W.Eugene Smith Award, the most prestigious award given to a photojournalist. Alain is one of the only Frenchmen, along with Gilles Peress in 1984, to win.

America Americas invites us to the birth of a photographer's life, by immersing us in a New York of the 70's, the one of John Dos Passos, Damon Runyon or Martin Scorsese.

After a backpacking trip around the world, Alain Keler became a photographer for the Sygma agency. He covers the revolution in Iran, the civil war in El Salvador, the Solidarnosc movement in Poland and other catastrophes. In 1986 he won the Paris Match Prize for his work on Ethiopia under the rain. But he realized that all this work had only one counter, the number of planes used. He then left his agency to start his real life as a photographer. The project Eastern Winds will be awarded the Eugene Smith Prize in 1997 in New York and will be published in 2000. The work The Land of the Burning Earth on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict received one of the 3P Foundation's awards in 2004. A work on his family completed the cycle Lost Memory, Found History.
ALain Keler is represented since 2008 by the agency M.Y.O.P