Born in Lyon, France, Alain Dister (1941–2008) was a nomad who got into photography and writing during long stays in the United States in 1966–69. His first articles on the hippie scene in Haight-Ashbury, where he lived, were published together with his photos in Rock&Folk and made his ambitions clear from the outset. ‘In the morning,’ he later recounted in his book Oh, hippie days!, ‘I feel like going out and taking photos, so as to make a connection with the world and pin it down with a complicated set of aesthetic and emotional values. To track down the familiar while filling the black box with the stuff you can’t take with you in a bag; photographing to have and hold—and to steal a little, no doubt. And to live.’ Back in France, he worked for the rock press and turned out radio programmes, TV documentaries and biographies of rock’n’roll heroes, carefully catching the aesthetics of the counterculture, and the attitudes and codes of modern tribes ranging from the Beat Generation to the hippies and from bikers to punks. His last opus, Punk Rockers! (2006) offers a succession of intimate shots of Patti Smith, The Clash, MC5, the Ramones and unknowns spotted at concerts or in the street, homing in on the angry, incurable joie de vivre underlying the weirdness: ‘You’re punk in the Lester Bangs sense: you’re the sacrificial iguana driven by the Stooges high on urban noise, a member of the garage band The Ramones, a straight-ahead rocker from Queens, or the MC5 gang from Detroit, radicalised by a manager crazy about free jazz. Whether you’re a Z-movie buff or a Rimbaud-style poetry fan, you belong to the Blank Generation.’
