Alain Keler: Retrospective
For more than sixty years, Alain Keler has travelled across a world shaped by conflict and upheaval. His photographs explore the relationship between history and individual lives, revealing how the turbulence of the present leaves its mark on people and their faces.
From Lebanon and Chechnya to Iran and El Salvador, Keler has documented wars, revolutions and political crises while remaining deeply attentive to those pushed aside by history: the displaced, the excluded and the forgotten. His powerful and poetic black and white photographs span several decades, moving between major historical events and the quieter realities of everyday life. This retrospective brings together the most significant works from his career for the first time. It includes his earliest photographs, his major reports for the Sygma and Gamma agencies, his long term projects on minorities in the former communist bloc and the discrimination faced by Roma communities, as well as more personal stories connected to his own family history.
To coincide with the exhibition, Delpire & Co is publishing a monograph devoted to Alain Keler’s work. Bringing together more than sixty years of photography, the book offers a comprehensive overview of his career and reflects his enduring interest in the connections between collective memory and personal experience. Moving from the world’s major upheavals to the intimate details of everyday life, it reveals the remarkable continuity of a body of work shaped by empathy, commitment and a deeply human vision.
Winner of a World Press Photo award in 1986 for his work in Ethiopia and the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 1997 for his project on minorities in the former communist bloc, Keler has consistently examined the ways in which history enters individual lives.
Contact sheets and travel notebooks offer further insight into the working process of a committed humanist photographer who records, preserves and archives everything, determined to prevent these stories from disappearing.
The exhibition is co-produced by the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie and Hôtel Fontfreyde, Centre photographique, with the support of the Fondation Antoine de Galbert.
About the Author
Alain Keler was born in Clermont Ferrand, France, in 1945. He lives and works in Paris.
A member of the MYOP collective since 2008, Keler has documented some of the most significant conflicts and political crises of the late twentieth century, including those in Lebanon, Chechnya, Israel and Palestine, Iran and El Salvador.
He later began developing more personal and long term projects, including Vents d’Est in 2000, Le Pays de la terre qui brûle in 2004, Parias, les Roms en Europe in 2010, Le Dernier voyage in 2014 and Après une si longue absence in 2023.
In 1986, he received both the Paris Match Grand Prize for Photojournalism and a World Press Photo award for his work in Ethiopia. In 1997, he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant for his project on minorities in the former communist bloc.
His monograph Journal d’un photographe, with a foreword by Dominique Versavel, was published by Éditions de Juillet in 2018. In 2022, he received the Visa d’or d’honneur at the Visa pour l’Image festival, recognising the lifetime achievement of a photographer who remains actively engaged in his practice.
Alain Keler: Retrospective
6 July 2026 to 4 October 2026
Les Rencontres d’Arles – France
