Rassemblant plus de 100 portraits de femmes réalisés par Walter Pfeiffer, la plupart totalement inédites, ce livre dévoile une facette pour le moins inhabituelle de l’œuvre substantielle de l’artiste zurichois qui poursuit ainsi sa quête de la beauté et du glamour avec élégance, ironie et esprit. Entre réalité et rêverie, instantané et mise en scène, économie de moyens et sophistication, classicisme et artifice, mélancolie et érotisme, les images hautement suggestives de Pfeiffer constituent une encyclopédie du désir.
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 facette to Walter Pfeiffer’s rich œuvre.
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-scène. 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.” (Martin Jaeggi)
