Walter Pfeiffer, whose work in the 1970s and 1980s prefigured many of the decisive developments in contemporary art today, is a classic artist’s artist―famous and beloved among art aficionados, yet almost forgotten by the public at large. Now, it’s the time to discover him as his images seem timelier than ever. Welcome Aboard! Photographs 1980–2000 is, at the same time, a monograph on Pfeiffer’s photographic work and an artist’s book, a photo-novel all of its own. Pfeiffer takes you on a long trip from suburban bliss to the horse race at Ascot, from wind-swept beaches to majestic mountain tops. Pfeiffer knows our dreams and artfully plays with them. In his still lives, landscapes, and portraits of beautiful boys and mischievous women, Pfeiffer celebrates his quest for beauty and glamour with sophistication, irony, and wit. Pfeiffer leads you in a world between reality and reverie, snapshot and mise-en-scene. It’s a photo album from Arcadia. With simple means Pfeiffer creates intelligent and classic images of beauty and bliss, imbued with a wistful awareness of their artifice. Stylish, suggestive, and erotic, his images are an encyclopedia of desire.

Walter Pfeiffer: Welcome Aboard: Photographs 1980-2000

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Edition Patrick Frey

Zurich artist Walter Pfeiffer presents us with more than 100 portraits of women in his new book Cherchez la femme! Most of these photographs are being published for the first time and show a new facet to Walter Pfeiffer's rich oeuvre. Pfeiffer celebrates his quest for beauty and glamour with sophistication, irony, and wit. He guides you through a world residing between reality and reverie, snapshot and mise-en-scene. With simple means he creates intelligent and classic images of beauty and bliss, imbued with a wistful awareness of their artifice. Stylish, suggestive, and erotic, his images create an encyclopedia of desire. Clever and elegant, Walter Pfeiffer's photographs elude classification and create a world of their own, thereby suspending the viewer between the being and seeming. The photographs spurn the indexical gesture of documentary photography, invested, as it is, with solemn intensity and mired in the delusion of a one-to-one rendition of reality. However, they are equally wary of wallowing indiscriminately in the phantasmagoria featured in the elaborately staged photography of recent years. Instead, Pfeiffer's recent pictures are utopian variations on reality that undercut the blunt documentary assertion of factuality with the narrative "once upon a time" of a fairy tale.

Walter Pfeiffer: Cherchez la Femme!

Photography & Video

The legacy of the pioneering Swiss Punk and New Wave scene is explored in all its facets and details the music, people, scenes, cities, events all are documented in chronological order. Filled with graphics, punk fashion, paraphernalia, interviews and stories, and presented in a format that won accolades for its design, this publication is a celebration of a radical and influential period. Includes two fold-out posters which schematically chart all the bands involved and all the musical releases from the period.

Hot Love : Swiss Punk and Wave 1976 - 1980. (English and German Edition)

Lurker

Mumenthaler

Sam. Grand

Roswitha Hecke's photo book Liebes Leben (Love Life) about the Zurich artist-muse and prostitute, Irene, also called "Lady Shiva," was published for the first time in 1978. It became both a cult book and an international success. Reprinted many times and translated into several languages, it is finally available again. The new, revised volume put out by Edition Patrick Frey presents photos that have never before been published. It is through the director Werner Schroeter that Roswitha Hecke met Irene. Irene, a secret star of Zurich's Boheme at that time, worked as a prostitute until her tragic accidental death. For three weeks Hecke photographed her daily routine in Zurich and accompanied her to Rome where Irene always celebrated her birthday. The result was a subtle and strong portrait of a woman, both beautiful and confident, with an unrivaled eroticism and proud elegance. The photos, a mix of choreographed and documentary work, capture an unusual immediacy and presence. Irene wanted to be pretty, to be a woman, to be free. She was direct and moody, like a child. She loved a flirt more than marriage. Tension more than harmony. Longing more than satisfaction. And distance more than contact. She lived her life according to this, come what may.

Roswitha Hecke: Irene

Andreas Zust - Himmel

Züst, Andreas

Walter Pfeiffer's Scrapbooks from 1969 to 1982 are a very unique Wunderkammer. Pfeiffer's polaroids and photographs alternate with miscellaneous objects newspaper clippings, postcards, packaging, tickets and brief punning notes. Pfeiffer assembles all of this into a large collage full of surprising references and comparisons that is both a visual diary and creative foundation of his artistic work. In his Scrapbooks, Pfeiffer's keen view of Eros, Zeitgeist and popular culture, his disrespectful humor as well as his appreciation for the poetry in the mundane and banal, are sharply revealed. They offer a view into Pfeiffer's meandering and playful universe and are a contemporary document that captures the Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s with ephemeral elegance.

Walter Pfeiffer: Scrapbooks: 1969-1985

A monographic publication on Swiss architect couple Trix and Robert Haussmann, this compact and richly illustrated book explores the work accomplished by the architects in depth, beginning with an introduction by editors Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen. Texts by contemporary artists Liam Gillick and Karl Holmqvist elaborate upon the themes, motives and artistic references the architects employ in their work, and a conversation with art historian Gabrielle Schaad deepens our understanding of their accomplishments from a more personal perspective.

Trix + Robert Haussmann

Architecture

The picture of jubilant race drivers raising oversized champagne bottles into the air is only too familiar. But the life of a race driver has always been dictated by losses, setbacks, confrontations with technical defects, accidents, disqualifications, and problems of an unknown nature. Like life in general, it is difficult. And that is what this book is about. Max Küng had collected automobile magazines since he was a child and had never missed a single Formula 1 television broadcast. Cars saved my childhood, Küng said. As a fat, unathletic boy with glasses, I didn't have any friends not counting the pile of automobile magazines.

Pensive Racing Drivers

In 1979 Catherine Ceresole and her husband Nicolas moved to New York, where he was to begin training as an audio engineer. In truth, however, the couple went there because they were captivated by the city's underground music scene. They soon became friendly with a number of musicians who Catherine began to photograph at concerts and in intimate settings. The result was a unique photographic documentary of the New York punk, no-wave and avant-garde music scene during its heyday. With her keen eye for dramatic moments, she captured them all on film: Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Glenn Branca, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay, the Beastie Boys and many others. After they returned to Switzerland, Catherine Ceresole continued to photograph musicians and their bands - with an unfailing ear and keen eye. The book is a visual music history of the last decades, presenting the work of this unique photographer to a broad public for the first time.

Catherine Ceresole: Beauty Lies in the Eye

HR Giger worked in the Shepperton Studios near London from February to November 1978, creating the figures and sets for the film Alien (1979) directed by Ridley Scott. The film became an international success, earning Giger an Oscar. In the transcribed Alien Diaries, published here for the first time as a facsimile, HR Giger describes his work in the studios. He writes, sketches, and takes photographs with his Polaroid SX70. With brutal honesty, sarcasm and occasional despair, Giger describes what it is like working for the film industry and how he struggles against all odds be it the stinginess of producers or the sluggishness of his staff to see his designs become reality. The Alien Diaries (in German transcription with an English translation) show a little-known personal side of the artist HR Giger and offer an unusual, detailed glimpse into the making of a movie classic through the eyes of a Swiss artist. The book contains almost completely unpublished material, including drawings, Polaroids showing the monster coming to life, and several still shots from the plentiful film material that Giger took in Shepperton.

H.R. Giger: Alien Tagebuecher / Diaries

Giger, H.R.

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