After graduating from the University of Television and Film Munich, Keel moved to Los Angeles. Keel wrote some scripts and continued to do art, but soon found himself overwhelmed and broke. Inspired by Hollywood celebrities who seem to talk about themselves, Keel wrote All About Me, a twenty-five chapter straightforward questionnaire on life and love, designed to help readers deepen their understanding of themselves.

Keel devoted the next decade to his art. During this period, Keel’s paintings and photographs were exhibited in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In an interview on his greatest influences, he said: “Strange as it may seem, most of my inspirations come from Los Angeles. You can find her irony, sadness, absurd beauty and childish naivety in all my work. This is where I think I will always create something new and force myself to overcome the fear of trying something I would be afraid to explore in other hemispheres.”

He later worked with artists such as Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, and Helmut Newton.

Attracted to the cinema already while studying piano in Boston, Philipp Keel attended the University of Television and Film (HFF) in Munich and then moved to Los Angeles. He made his first feature film with John Dunkley, a Native American of the Ojibwa tribe. At the age of thirty, his book All About Mewas published. Its successful sales enabled him to become a full-time photographer. While living in LA he went over to working in colour.This city, “with its sad and ironic sides, its absurd beauty and childish naivety,” was to remain his main artistic reference. After the death of his father, Daniel Keel, the founder and owner of the Diogenes publishing house in Zurich, he managed to juggle his inherited duties and his life as an artist, authoring several books published by Steidl. His 1999 diptych Whisper, shown at OSMOSCOSMOS, appeared in his second book, Color.