My Colorful Life

Book excerpt: 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. 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.