Kaleidos images

is an image agency.
The idea was born in 1993 and we have been in existence, in one form or another, since 1997.

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And then there is life

Kaleidos images – the story

It was August 24, 1993. 16:30.
I had an appointment with Hervé Merliac1.

Each of us wanted to use our photos in a different way. Hervé had the impression that the quantity of images he had made over the years was not being properly exploited and he wanted to start working on reports that interested him more than the possible orders. For my part, I wanted to do more than the commercial, industrial or catalog photos I was doing until then.

The agency was to be called Alyas and was intended to provide

    • subjects already prepared or done
    • illustrative images
    • the production of images or reports
    • the production of catalog photos
    • the creation of catalogs and books
    • production of model or artist books

We also wanted to make postcards and posters from our photographs. Offer limited edition prints for collectors…

In short. We wanted to make sort of an “image box” to be able to offer our photographs and those made by our friends and colleagues in all possible forms to a range of clients that went from private individuals to media and advertising companies.

We were already the kings of oil.

Then there is life

I took a job in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and passed my Parisian clients on to Hervé. Then we lost touch for a while.

In the meantime the Photo CD2 invented by Kodak in 1991, was beginning to be marketed and I was able to digitize some of my photos during my stay in Saudi Arabia.

I already had a Compuserve e-mail address3 since 1989, and I was wandering around on BBS4 various and sundry. The idea of an online image bank came to me very quickly. It was 1995.

Then there is life

I changed my path completely. My stay in Arabia had gradually diverted me from my creativity and photography. Separation, then a new meeting quickly put me back on track. Return to France. I took back my cameras and the image bank project. The WWW5 began its breakthrough…

Then there is life

Things were quickly becoming clear to me. In 1996, I was far from being able to realize what I had envisioned as a project. So back to square one, I started in traditional. My photographer friends6 began to take an interest in the project, which was now called Kaleidos. And it had become a real association. From 1901.

Philippe Guéry, Désirée Sadek and especially Laurent Abad arrive and contribute to the photographic fund.

I developed an image management software that classified the photos, assigned a serial number, managed captions and keywords – all in three languages. I made a classic book and slide boards with some of our best photos, then, bam! I made the rounds of the magazines and editions to promote us. And we had some publications!

Then there is life

Divorce, depression, illness. Then moves, marriage and writing. I found myself in Perpignan and was beginning to get interested in subjects that required a long-term commitment. I will name here the Palestinian refugees and specifically those from the Chatila camp in Lebanon. Twenty minutes walk from the family home in Beirut. It was life that interested me, much more than the macabre stories of massacres and death.

Faced with the more than disappointing reactions of some editors and publishers7
I decided to follow my heart and make two books without the support of an established publishing house. It’s a project that took me more than fifteen years.

I have done about twenty exhibitions since 2000 and continued with my commercial photos and small magazine reports. The Kaleidos project has been slowly moving to the second or even third level. Some jolts though: Hervé Merliac and I got back in touch, we invited each other to our respective weddings, we talked again about the image bank, he promised to put his stock of images in it and we started with a beautiful subject on Ayahuasca and a nice publication in Le Monde 2.

Then there is life

I’m involved in a great project, non-photographic, around shea butter. Hervé dies of cancer. I participate in a prospective think tank project around Africa.

Things are coming together. Covid. Divorce. STROKE. Tumor.

I am out of order. For over three years. I recover, I relapse. Ups and downs. Then all of a sudden, something clicked. An emergency that brings me back to 1993.

I can see myself with Hervé discussing our deepest desires around photography. And so I decided to roll up my sleeves…

And here you are…

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1
Hervé Merliac (1958-2018)

Reporter photographer who has worked for the Associated Press agency among others.


2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD


3
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
https://www.compuserve.com


4
Bulletin Board Systems, the ancestors of social networking – without photos, sound or video. Only text. You had to call a specific server, via a modem, connect and then read and leave messages. Sometimes we could talk with live correspondents, but, since these were phone calls that we paid by the minute, it became very expensive very quickly.

For Compuserve you had to call the United States… I let you imagine.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system


5
World Wide Web – the web as we know it today. Back then we were still at WWW 1.0, bandwidth was extremely low and there were not as many photos/videos/music as today. If there was any, it was in low, or even very low, resolution. We were still dependent on modems that had a theoretical maximum speed of 7 kilobytes per second. For comparison an ADSL link has a theoretical speed between 8 and 12 Mega bytes and a fiber link reaches between 100 and 600 Mega bytes per second… Things go tens of thousands of times faster today.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web


6
In no particular order: Désirée Sadek, Philippe Guéry, Bernard Ouillet, Laurent Abad…


7
Among the most crunchy: “Nobody is interested in the lives of Palestinians”, “The daily lives of refugees don’t sell”, “Ah, but… if you had done a story on Palestinian terrorists, it would sell tens of thousands of copies”. I will not mention the names of these people and companies with questionable values…