Walter Pfeiffer: 1970-1980

Full-bleed black and white images, a lack of captions, extreme body close-ups, boys and boys and more boys: these are the trademarks of Walter Pfeiffer’s now out-of-print 1980 cult classic. As an autodidact Pfeiffer started taking photographs–without any technical ambition but with the will to provide a new visual vocabulary for beauty, eroticism, and freedom of life. The images depict the 1970-1980 Zurich scene: some feature Pfeiffer’s friends hanging out in the studio, nearly all explore the sexuality of the everyday. Organized in stunning visual sequences, the book brought the public’s attention to Pfeiffer’s polaroids and established him as a sort of underground icon. This faithful reprint of the original visually demonstrates how the documented decade of Pfeiffer’s work flirted with gay subculture and later became a template for today’s magazine imagery.