WALTER PFEIFFER - PART 1

INTERVIEW BY BOB NICKAS
PORTRAIT BY MIGUEL FERNANDEZ



Walter Pfeiffer has been chasing beauty for almost 40 years now, making pictures that are as much a product of his obsessions as of his precision. Maybe it’s the sense of Swiss order that has influenced the Zurich-based photographer to set up his scenes, direct his models, and compose his pictures so perfectly. But it’s also his need to tease something sexy out of the everyday. The secret to his work’s seductive charm is his playful humor and his wayward, endless curiosity. Walter uses his camera to promiscuously record the world around him. Little known for many years outside of Europe, Pfeiffer’s work has appeared more regularly in magazines, his own photo books, and exhibitions alongside photographers who share his more libidinal sensibility—Ryan McGinley, Jack Pierson, and Wolfgang Tillmans. A long-overdue retrospective opens in November in Winterthur, Switzerland, accompanied by a comprehensive book compiled by Pfeiffer.


Vice: So, what beautiful girls and boys have you been chasing around with your camera lately?

Walter Pfeiffer: Oh, so many, you know, because I have to work all the time. Today I was location scouting for i-D magazine. The only thing I want to do for them is very tight underwear.

Click here for a slide show of Pfeiffer’s Work.

Always the tightest and the whitest.

Yeah. I said, please look for the tightest.

What are you working on now?

I’m very busy because of this retrospective. I’ll be filling up the whole Fotomuseum in November.

In Winterthur?

Yes. We’re still looking through the work since ’71 and we’re only now up to 1982. It’s so huge! I never look through my negatives, and it’s so strange if somebody else does it for you. You see so many pictures and you think, “Oh, is it really good?”

When people work with you it’s more like they’re a fan of yours than a curator or an editor. They want to see more and more.

That’s how it is at the moment. If you work a lot you don’t see correctly—I mean, I see correctly looking back to the 70s because it’s so far away—but the new things I don’t see. Every day I develop new film and I just put it away.

You don’t look at the pictures?

Not right away.

One thing that’s interesting to me is how, when you sequence books and install shows, you often put a picture from the 70s or 80s next to one that you’ve taken more recently, and somehow they work together. It doesn’t look like an older picture next to a new one. There’s a continuity to the way you look at the world, to the way you arrange the world for your camera.

My view of the world is always the same. I have the same desire now as then.

Your work is very much about desire, and you’ve always managed to find models who are real people, long before this was a trendy fashion approach.

Sometimes I’ll take an oldie—an old star, someone I’ve shot already—and even if they may not have the style I want anymore, they might surprise me. In my case there’s such a small time when they are in bloom. It lasts maybe two years when they’re really at their peak.

What do you mean they’re “at their peak?” Like, they have a certain look and then they lose it?

It’s like May. It doesn’t last long. But sometimes I get them to ask someone I’m interested in if I can take their picture.

It sounds like you get them to pimp their friends.

Yes, yes, that’s because at my age it’s humiliating to ask.

Humiliating?

A little bit. Sometimes it works when I ask, but I’m so afraid of them saying no because it’s so embarrassing.

I would think that as the years go by, the rejection would be easier because you’ve been doing it for so long. And also because you’re gentle and charming. You’re not very threatening to them. I think you play that up too: “Oh, I’m so innocent.”

Sometimes I say, “Oh, why don’t you bring your friends?” Or I see somebody with them and I’ll say, “He’s so nice. Bring him.”

You refer to your models as your “stars.”

Yes, absolutely, but you know stars. I always say, “I’m Mr. Walter Goldwyn Pfeiffer.”

[laughs] Like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—MGM. I know you love old Hollywood, the beauty and glamour and movies and music from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In a way, you’re bringing this kind of glamour from the past into the present.

It comes from when I was growing up. I had a simple life and we didn’t have much money. We didn’t even have a TV, but I could buy all those German movie magazines. When we went through everything for the retrospective, I discovered a notebook from when I was 14. There was a story where I talk about everything in my room. It’s funny because it’s mostly pictures of German stars.

So you’ve been starstruck since you were a teenager?

Yes.

And you’re still kind of a teenager.

Maybe. I think it’s because when I was really young I didn’t have many friends. I was kind of a loner. I thought, in the 80s, when I had to have many boys for this boy book...

Your book called The eyes, the thoughts, ceaselessly wandering?

Yes, that book. I thought that maybe I would go through a second childhood.

Did you have a rich fantasy life when you were a teenager?

Yes, because nobody told me about sex or anything.

They didn’t tell you about the birds and the bees?

No, they didn’t tell me about that. When I had my apprenticeship I didn’t even know what to learn. I always wanted to learn how to draw and hated exercise and sports. I was always really afraid when we had to climb up the rope in school because I couldn’t climb it. I did everything wrong and the coach hated me.

You have all these young models now who pose for you and you don’t even have to pay them because it’s fun for them and they enjoy being around you. You have more friends now than you could’ve had when you were 14. So it’s kind of a great revenge.

You say “revenge,” really? I don’t think about that much… I can’t stop.

This idea of not being able to stop—and I don’t mean this in a negative way because obviously it drives your work—it’s clear that you’re kind of obsessed.

Yeah, I’m obsessed. For example, Sunday is the only day I don’t work. So I go out in the country. The time now is right to walk in the mountains. It’s very strange. Earlier this year I lost my way but I came into a very typical Swiss scene. It was dusk, and I saw two boys embracing each other, and then they began to fight. The one who ends up on his back is the loser. It’s an old Swiss tradition, and there is a big fiesta with these fights. And they’re so classic and archetypical.

If you take pictures while hiking in the mountains, you understand that the mountains have always been there, and always will be. It’s the same with the ocean. But you’re also photographing young kids—people in the prime of their life. It makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. As long as you keep painting the picture—or in your case, taking the picture—your subject will stay young and beautiful forever. So you’re trying to do the impossible.

It is impossible, absolutely. When I see models 20 years after I’ve photographed them, I say, “Ohhh, what happened?”

But what’s great is that you have both people in one body. You have the person in front of you, the older person, and also the image of the younger person in your mind.

You know, for the opening they will all be there—I hope.

It’s clear that a lot of your photographs have been set up or staged. You pose the people, you choose the background, scout locations. On one hand, your pictures seem very real—they’re a reflection of reality and very direct—but somehow we’re also aware that you’ve totally composed the picture. It’s like you’re setting up “real” pictures.

When it’s winter and I can’t get out, I have to set up here in my four walls. Then I just have the wall and I have to think of something where they’re not posing too much, not reacting too much. I have to make it so that they don’t realize the camera is there. In the summer, I mostly go out and I’ll see a nice surrounding and then we go there.


TO BE CONTINUED
WALTER PFEIFFER | 1 | 2 |

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