Walter Pfeiffer: Cherchez La Femme

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.