Pierre Keller (*1945 in Switzerland) is a graphic designer and photographer, he was Director of the ECAL from 1995-2011 and still promotes art and culture today as a founding member of the Montreux Jazz Festivals and President of Vins Vaudois. In the 70s, he photographed men where he had followed them or where they had followed him. He describes photography as a sexual act. Sometimes they both went hand in hand. Self-censorship was always out of the question, and pleasure always came first — in the form of good-looking men amid a veritable banquet of earthly delights. In the words of Jean Tinguely, an artist Keller admires to this day, his snapshots might be described as culinary “anti-porn”: images for the inner cinema. And yet this tumescent horn of visual plenty did not go over big at the time: photography wasn’t considered gallery art yet.
In the large-format book 'My Colorful Life' the Polaroids of Pierre Keller finally gain their well-deserved fame.
For ten or fifteen years, Pierre Keller kept a photographic journal of his life in the form of some four thousand Polaroids. They were shot in pulsating 1970s New York, where he stayed till 1983, on trips to South America, and on the northwest shores of Lake Geneva in his native region of Lavaux. His artistic companions in those days included the likes of Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe. Unlike Mapplethorpe, Pierre Keller never worked with professional models.
Memories of shared experiences, as well as the deaths of a number of those portrayed, steep Keller’s Polaroids in every color of the rainbow, every tint of gay life in those days: brown skin, milky-white asses, red dicks, white dildos, sassy statements, the neon-green secrecy of the bath houses and true-blue moments of contemplative poetry.
Pierre Keller. My Colorful Life
With texts by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stephanie Moisdon, French / English, 29 x 29 cm, 408 pages, 369 color ills., hardcover € 90,-, Edition Patrick Frey ISBN 978-3-906803-55-5
The project including an exhibition is now on display in Consortium Galerie in Dijon. The next book vernissage for 'My Colorful Life' takes place on 15 March 2018 in Zurich (Edition Patrick Frey, Limmatsrasse 268). Further press information on Meike Gattermann and her is available on kulturagentur.net.
