Alain Dister

Biography

Alain Dister is the author of numerous works concerning the topics of Rock music, the 1960s and the Beat literary movement in the United States. He worked for the French magazine Rock & Folk. His book, Oh Hippy Days! (2001) chronicled America at the end of the 1960s. He was among the first European photographers to join the Haight Ashbury scene in San Francisco in the mid-1960s (sexual liberation, drugs, psychedelic music, etc.) and chronicled the Summer of Love. He lived with key Beat Generation authors and artists, including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the subject of another book, Beat generation : la génération hallucinée (1997). He was a chronicler of the emerging Rock scene in America, writing about such illustrious musicians as Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa. He also followed the emerging Punk scene in Japan in the 1990s.

As a photographer, Dister was best known for his photographs of the world of Rock and Roll in the United States in the 1960s. He has been exhibited in various museums and galleries around the world. Alain Dister was a promoter of French culture and an art critic for the journal Connaissance des arts He lived and worked in Paris and Bourgogne. His view of the attitudes and aesthetics of Rock, of Punk, of other genre ignored by the Academics (especially in France) made him a witness of the counter-culture in America.

Exhibitions