Hippies, fincas and a cat on a whitewashed roof
As a large-scale retrospective of his work opens in Barcelona, we look back at the remarkable Ibiza archive of the American photographer Tony Keeler.
Few photographers captured the bohemian innocence of Ibiza in the 1970s better than the late Tony Keeler. Raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Keeler began his photographic career in 1960, when he opened his first studio in Sitges, a hippy enclave just southwest of Barcelona. Fresh off the boat and open to opportunity, Keeler found himself in a receptive environment where the word soon spread about a photographer whose portraits differed from the standard.
Keeler’s hyper-active eye continued working far beyond the studio sessions. He knew there was a universe out there, full of interesting people to capture, inspiring atmospheres to distil and textures to explore. Upon his arrival in Ibiza with his wife Linda in the 1970s, Keeler’s camera soon became trained upon the fascinating social climate of the era, when counterculture hippies and the stoic payés community of the island existed in a near-perfect vision of harmony. His subjects – the lean, tanned, barely-dressed flowerchildren and their stern-faced, black-clad, campo-dwelling Ibicenco counterparts – were diametrically opposed to one another, yet exist together in Keeler’s images as two sides of the same magic.
Keeler’s first book, Ibiza: A Dream, has become an increasingly rare cult classic. As interest in Keeler’s work grows among a younger generation, a new exhibition of his work opens in Barcelona today.
https://www.iefc.cat/agenda-detall/keelerscope-exposicio-toni-keeler/
