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.