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

–

August 24, 1993, 4:30 pm. Two photographers share a common ambition: to free their images from commercial constraints. Hervé Merliac and his interlocutor share the creator’s frustration at the limited exploitation of his work. One dreams of personal reportage, the other wants to go beyond industrial and catalog photography.

Alyas was born, a multi-faceted image agency project: a bank of prepared subjects, reportage production, catalog creation, postcard publishing and prints for collectors. A “box of images” aimed at all audiences, from private individuals to the media.

The detours of destiny

Saudi Arabia abruptly interrupts this trajectory. Jeddah, Parisian clients passed on to Hervé, then the distance that erased the projects. But it was there, in 1995, that a revolutionary idea was born: an online image bank. The first Kodak Photo CDs enabled digitization, CompuServe had already been offering an e-mail address since 1989, and the emerging World Wide Web opened up unprecedented prospects.

The return to France marked a renaissance. Alyas becomes Kaleidos, an association under the French law of 1901. Philippe Guéry, Désirée Sadek and Laurent Abad enrich the photographic collection. Multilingual management software classifies images, assigns serial numbers and manages captions and keywords. Classic books and slide plates make the rounds of the editorial offices. The first publications arrive.

When life takes its course

Divorce, depression, illness. Personal trials relegated Kaleidos to the background. Perpignan became his new port of call, and with it a different kind of photographic commitment: the Palestinian refugees of the Chatila camp, a twenty-minute walk from his family’s Beirut home.

Faced with disappointing reactions from publishers – “No one is interested in the lives of Palestinians”, “The daily lives of refugees don’t sell” – the decision was made to publish without an established publishing house. Fifteen years of work would result in two books.

Twenty exhibitions since 2000, magazine reports and commercial commissions keep the business going. Kaleidos slumbers, awakened intermittently: reunion with Hervé, respective weddings, promises to feed the image bank, fine publication in Le Monde 2 on Ayahuasca.

Digital resurrection

Side projects, disappearance of Hervé, COVID, divorce, stroke, tumour. More than three years out of action, between relapses and remissions. Then the trigger. An urgency that instantly brings us back to 1993, face to face with Hervé and their shared photographic dreams.

Today, Kaleidos rises from its digital ashes. Thirty years after that first meeting, the image agency has rediscovered its original vocation: to give a voice to images, offering them every possible channel of expression.

The story continues.