If you don’t know Walter Pfeiffer by name, you will almost certainly recognise his images. Something about their high-contrast, terribly colourful, tightly framed lexicon probably feels utterly familiar…
If you agree, but cannot quite put your finger on the reason why, a clue lies in an essay by the co-curator of Pfeiffer’s latest retrospective titled In Good Company, published in the accompanying photobook by the same name. In it, Nicola Trezzi describes Pfeiffer as a ‘prophet of image-making,’ and outlines how the artist anticipated many of the visual codes that define social media-era fashion imagery today.
Pfeiffer, then, feels remarkably familiar because we constantly encounter images like his on our Instagram feeds, where—for better or worse—culture has become increasingly cyclical and self-referential. A good part of contemporary photography seems to exist in a suspended state, somewhere outside of “the contemporary,” if such a term still retains any meaning. The persistent relevance of Pfeiffer’s work raises an obvious question: why do these images continue to be synonymous with our ultra-digital present, when they were made by an artist now in his eighties?
Perhaps the answer lies in a paradox. While Pfeiffer’s photographic language has been so readily adopted in the digital sphere, its origins are resolutely grounded in the physical. ‘I like paradoxes,’ Pfeiffer wrote by email, ‘they make life more exciting!’
The artist began by photographing friends, and friends of friends who dropped by his apartment in Zurich during the 1970s and 1980s. ‘I treated the people I photographed as if they were stars,’ Pfeiffer tells me over email, ‘They were beautiful and they appeared even more beautiful in my pictures. I felt I must chase and capture beauty.’
The emphasis on connection follows Pfeiffer throughout his career and forms a central pillar of both his recent retrospective and publication. The title of each, In Good Company, speaks to the artist’s collaborative process, his reliance on friends as subjects, and the cherished objects and things that populate his world. Personal connection and tactile reality emanates from these images. At times, one feels almost able to hear a loud billowing laugh while looking at them; they are that evocative.
By the time the digital turn came to be, however, Pfeiffer was already in his sixties. After years of toiling in relative obscurity—certainly as far as outside of Europe is concerned—he received some of his earliest fashion editorial commissions from Dutch magazine publishers Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom in the early 2000s, who would later launch Fantastic Man in 2005 and The Gentlewoman in 2010 and continue to commission Pfeiffer.
From there, the number of commissions only continued to grow, along with the prestige of the publications seeking his work; French Vogue, Dazed, Self Service, and i-D all embraced Pfeiffer’s irresistible blend of humour, vibrancy, and seduction, recognising that his work had something utterly contemporary about it, despite the fact that it wasn’t quite as contemporary as one might think. It’s a visual style the artist had developed—and stayed true to—for the preceding thirty-odd years.
Meanwhile, other photographers and countless publications appear to reference Pfeiffer continuously online. This points towards another—and perhaps more intriguing—reason for his enduring influence. Not only do his images evoke the tactile realities for which we may long, they also fit neatly within the algorithmic framework of the attention economy.
To borrow photo editor Emily Keegin’s viral breakdown of the subject on the podcast The Cutting Room Floor, fashion photography today largely favours cropped subjects captured in frames that are ‘just about clothes and space.’ These visually clean and quickly captivating images perform better on feeds. They do not require prolonged attention, like a detailed landscape photograph or narrative scene might. Effective simplicity reigns. It certainly does in Pfeiffer’s images, which rarely feature more than two people, and which hardly ever are zoomed out enough for spectators to see both a subject’s face and the lower half of their body simultaneously.
The digital life of Pfeiffer’s connective images also play into our collective sense that our world seems to have lost something. The nostalgic or “backwards-looking” language of contemporary photography in the post-digital era is well documented; as today, hoards of historians of photography attempt to grapple with the reasons why photographers and spectators alike continue to turn to previous forms of the medium, and to value the analogue over the digital. Of nostalgia, Pfeiffer writes, ‘I do not believe in nostalgia, and even today, with all that is happening, I want to keep in contact with the real world. I love to connect. Technology is just a tool, we use it the way we want.’
Perhaps, however, it is precisely because many very powerful people are not using new technology in a way some of us want, that we look to nostalgic forms of image making for clues as to how to access previous ways of living, relating and existing. In this way, nostalgia in our culture is rather positive, as the past can be viewed as an opening.
Trezzi believes a slippery relationship with time and the contemporary is another prophetic aspect of the artist’s work; ‘he made sure that dates would never rule over the image, leaving us to wonder whether an image was taken in the 1970s or the 2000s. In a time of suspended temporality (in the same way the term contemporary art has been dragged around for decades now), this becomes a seminal condition,’ writes Trezzi. Pfeiffer’s retrospective also unfolds thematically, as opposed to chronologically. Pfeiffer clarified to me over email that ‘[Nicolas] writes that although I know all the dates, he believes I do not write them because I wanted to keep things open to let people wonder and imagine.’
No matter the reason, commissioning fashion houses and magazines don’t seem to care. The artist is perhaps more solicited than ever before. ‘As I get older, I feel I have less time,’ Pfeiffer tells me. ‘Therefore I work all the time. I want to achieve as much as possible, considering that time is limited, especially for me.’
