Pfantastic Mr Pfeiffer

You can tell a lot about the artist Walter Pfeiffer by his work. His vibrant and colourful photographs of gorgeous young people, spontaneous and irreverent images, tell viewers that he is a vibrant and colorful man himself, with a playful sense of humor. His collages – which juxtapose ads, magazine clippings, found photos and other visual ephemera – hint at stints as a department store graphic designer and stylist earlier in his career, where he honed his careful eye for arrangement.

From the late 1960s until the ’90s, Pfeiffer was a devoted scrapbooker: “I always felt much better when I glued and worked and made books,” he says. “When I work, I forget everything.”

Also, the sheer volume and range of work – his oeuvre encompasses photography, illustration, collage, painting and film – suggests his relentless hunger to make art. Shortly before Christmas, when I reach Pfeiffer by phone at his home in Zurich, the 80-year-old tells me he is “full of work. I’m always working without a break, never a break. It’s always like this. I work all the time. I have a huge amount of work because I was only happy when I worked.”

A conversation with Pfeiffer is a treasure map, marked by twists and unexpected detours that lead to priceless finales. Asked whether he enjoys getting older, he replies: “I do. It would be a lie if I said, ‘Oh no, no.’ I look forward. And I will work until it’s over, until it’s not possible anymore. I’m getting more tired now. I have this horrible thing with my spine – I bend forward like an old witch with a stick. You know those old witches? That’s me now. People see me and say, ‘No! What happened? Oh, it’s terrible!’ When I work, I have this wonderful group of great people who I know well. They gave me a cane, and I’m all good to work. When everything is organized, I can work, but running to the store to go shopping? That’s over.” 

Pfeiffer doesn’t consider himself too nostalgic, yet for the past several months his attention has been cast back through six decades of image-making, in preparation for an upcoming retrospective at Turin’s Pinacoteca Agnelli. 

The exhibition, titled Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company, opens in late April and will feature work from the early ’70s to 2025, including, for the first time, his fashion photography.

Pfeiffer has always loved clothes and dressing up, but concedes that it took a long time before the fashion world turned to him for his singularly stylish point of view. He grew up in the rural Swiss village Neunkirch and moved to Zurich in 1966 to study art at the F+F School of Art and Design, where he began photographing friends and strangers alike with a Polaroid camera.

Soon, Pfeiffer turned to flash photography, owing to a shake in his hand that made his photos otherwise blurry. “My hands are so shaky – now, even worse than before,” he says. “I shook since I was born.” He pursued image-making while working for Zurich’s Globus department store, then at his alma mater, where he taught drawing and painting rather than photography. The distinctive style of his work put him at odds with the school’s then-director, he explains.

For a period beginning in the late 1980s, Pfeiffer stopped taking photos entirely, instead devoting himself to painting. It was around 2001, with the publication of his book Welcome Aboard, Photographs 1980–2000 and an exhibition in Zurich, that fashion brands and magazines came calling, and he has worked consistently ever since. 

“It came as it came,”Pfeiffer says. “Everything I did later was destiny. I was kind of naive and learned, step by step, in this jungle of life.”

Sexual openness was absent from Pfeiffer’s upbringing – “I come from the deepest countryside, and nobody taught me about the bees. I had to step into that world, into the apprentissage,” he says – but it emerged early in his work and became something of a signature. Gender play, muscled physiques, nudes: his desirous lens creates souvenirs of fleeting romances.

More broadly, his work reveals a lifelong fascination with all things beautiful. In a 1974 interview for the catalog of “Transformer,” a group exhibition he participated in at Kunstmuseum Luzern, he was asked what beauty was to him. “Let’s say it’s the quality that, in the age of classical painting, compelled a painter to use a certain model,” he replied. 

More than 50 years later, Pfeiffer’s definition remains unchanged. “I was always fascinated by the classical world,” he says. “I was always seeking it in the library of the art school, looking through classical books. It’s always been a classical kind of beauty.” Asked how he defines ugliness, he stumbles: “It’s as difficult as beauty to describe. Ugliness is more, for me, an ugly attitude toward life. Misbehavior or something. I don’t know any ugly people.” 

A tender observer of youth, Pfeiffer does not subscribe to the notion that today’s young are overly anxious, brain-rotted narcissists. “Sometimes, even when I come from the grocery store, and they see me walking with my bags full of things, young ones ask: ‘Can I help you?’ So, I can’t say youths nowadays are rotten.” Among them, he searches for otherworldly beauties who will behave normally in front of his camera. He can’t stand the posing of supermodels. Most of all, he loves photographing people he finds by chance — people he meets in a club or on the street. Or, say, the son of a man he previously photographed. 

Some missed connections continue to haunt him: “One day, at 16, I had to go to Zurich. Next to me was this boy who looked like – really, he was the double of – Paul Newman. So beautiful. I had no camera, nothing, but I always see his picture.”

Pfeiffer says the secret to his longevity as an artist is sheer, innate persistence: “I’ve heard so many say: ‘I give up.’And I can’t. It’s no secret. When the work or the opportunity to work is still exciting, then you try to do the best you can.”