Walter Pfeiffer

In 2001, Edition Patrick Frey published Welcome Aboard, a compilation of Walter Pfeiffer’s photographs from 1980 to 2022. The book revealed Pfeiffer’s importance as a pioneer of contemporary photography and laid the foundation for his rise from a classic “artist’s artist” to a world-renowned artist who went on to work for international magazines like Vogue and shoot campaigns for luxury brands like Bottega Veneta. Chez Walti retraces the arc of this recent work over the past 23 years and shows how Pfeiffer ?ne-tuned and renewed his photographic gaze, absorbing in?uences from the current zeitgeist even while remaining unmistakably himself in both his personal and commissioned work. Pfeiffer’s light, witty touch and unfailing eye for beauty are the hallmarks of his gorgeous guys and cheeky gals, lush still lifes and bucolic landscapes, chic fashion and bare skin. Chez Walti catapults us into Walter Pfeiffer’s weightless parallel universe, whose magic has intensi?ed over the past two decades.

A humorous tribute to Matteo Thun, one of Italy’s most distinguished designers and architects, and his work. In the summer of 2009, Swiss photographer Walter Pfeiffer made an extensive trip from Zurich to the Italian island of Capri, taking shots of some 50 of Thun’s design objects en route. Yet, rather than doing a mere documentation of these items, Pfeiffer created highly lively tableaux vivants. The artist was accompanied on his journey by Thun’s two then teenage sons, who thus form the main visual narrative of the book and appear in many pictures together with their father’s creations. A brief introduction by Matteo Thun’s wife Susanne and an index of the depicted design gems round out this extraordinary and entertaining visual travelogue.

Walter Pfeiffer is now a world-renowned photographer. Although he began his artistic career as a draftsman, Pfeiffer’s drawings are known to precious few. So this book is an overdue overview of his graphic work, continually engaged in a fertile dialogue with his photographic work. In the early 1970s Pfeiffer produced large-scale hyper-realistic pencil drawings that served as points of departure and even working models for his photographs. This style gave rise to personal works as well as Pfeiffer’s legendary posters for the Zürich Filmpodium, magazine illustrations and commissioned portraits. Beginning in the 1980s and especially in the ‘90s, Pfeiffer gave up photography for a time to focus on drawings in China ink, colored pencils and watercolors, in which the elegant free play of lines and colors moves into the foreground: intimate portraits of beautiful boys and the artist’s close women friends, still lifes and flowers. These pictures are characterized by a cheerful, wakeful sensuality, sure lines and alternation between graphic reduction and a taste for rich ornamentation. This publication is not a conventional retrospective, but a stand-alone artist’s book in which to discover the vivacity of his drawings and a new Walter Pfeiffer.