To say that in their place are his photographs, collected around the town hall of Vincennes – rue Eugène-Renaud and cours Marigny, until 30 September -, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the America Festival, dedicated to the literatures and cultures of North America , which takes place from 22 to 25 September. Because the United States was the search for a life for Alain Dister (1941-2008), a son of the Beat generation who had to be involved in the counterculture.
The intimate bond is intertwined in the summer of 1966 when the Frenchman, who then participated in the creation of the magazine Rock & Folkarrives in New York with a DSLR and three lenses as main luggage, “persuaded, he writes, that somewhere on the road we will have left this old skin called education, family, bank account, work, death on credit “.
The book accompanying the exhibition, In America. Fifty years of photography (Albin Michel, 320 pages, 39 euros, in bookstores on September 28), compiled from his archives, indicates that this fate was written in August 1944, when a liberating GI picked up a 3-year-old child. In Le Vésinet, near Paris, the young Dister adheres unreservedly to the American dream, distributed with reinforcements of chewing gum, blond cigarettes and nylon stockings: “France was gray. Elsewhere the sun was shining. Elsewhere, we have dreamed of Technicolor. The soundtrack, the rhythm, they came from California, they would spread all over the world. “
He took his first photos of musicians in Los Angeles – Sonny & Cher, The Mothers of Invention – but it was in the San Francisco communities that Dister found his home. “Musk on the girls’ skin, sweet grass, patchouli, incense in tastefully decorated rooms made for love. ” He believes he will find paradise in the fog-drowned Victorian houses of Haight-Ashbury and experiences the hippie adventure from the inside, the anti-Vietnam war protests such as the Fillmore light shows.
Disillusionment
Infused with American music, Dister is equally steeped in imagery, whether it’s Walker Evans’ empathic vernacular or Robert Frank’s iconoclastic documentary. But the disillusionment is not long in coming: “It lasted the space of a spring and a summer. The American reality had not moved an inch. She had first looked at her with a vaguely worried look, then she, reassured by smiles and flowers, she was waiting for an opportunity to belittle this beautiful world. “
One of his photos symbolizes the end of unconsciousness: a couple kissing under the San Francisco sun in June 1968, each holding a copy of a newspaper announcing the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The era is one of paranoia and chaos, and New York concentrates its spirit, before its “cleansing” by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Dister roams the Bowery and CBGB rock club for the Ramones and the Cramps. “OK. I’m 35. Not an age for a punk. But that won’t stop me from continuing to claim the right to be anandouille when I feel like it.”jokes.
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