Camera libido: the photography of Walter Pfeiffer

Imagine an optical device designed to project--and then to trace--a virtual image of desire onto the plane surface of everyday life. That would be Walter Pfeiffer's libidinal camera lucida. Since the late '6os, beginning in his native Zurich, Pfeiffer has sought (and caught) images of youth and beauty as if on an endless quest, the avocation of entwined hedonism and reportage its own reward. And ours. It's a quest others have pursued before and since: Pfeiffer is heir to photographers such as Wilhelm von Gloeden and Herbert List and the painter Paul Cadmus as well as a contemporary of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar. Pfeiffer, who at age fifty-six is as mischievous as ever, has been exploring the eroticized territory of the everyday for more than thirty years, and this is where we find many younger photographers working today, most notably Jack Pierson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Terry Richardson, and Ryan McGinley. Possibly the least well known of all these artists, Walter Pfeiffer remains a central but elu sive figure.

Until now, there have been only two collections of his photographs, the out-of print cult classic Walter Pfeiffer: 1970-1980 (Elke Betzel, 1980) and The eyes, the thoughts, ceaselessly wandering (Nachbar der Welt, 1986), available in a limited edition. With the recent publication of Welcome Aboard, Photographs 1980-2000 (Edition Patrick Frey/Scab, 2001), a good long look at what he's been up to for the past twenty years, his earlier pictures can be placed in context with those that have followed. Last winter's exhibition at Scab in New York, his very first in the States, gave younger artists like McGinley, who mines a similarly fearless and free-spirited aesthetic vein, a chance to see Pfeiffer's work in the flesh. In addition to recent color photography, there were lyrical line drawings as well as black-and-white Polaroids circa 1970. On the counter, books containing hundreds of images going back to his earliest days offered an almost retrospective view. The further back one went, the more deeply Pfeiffer's work appeared to resonate with our time. If it's possible for an artist to have influenced a younger generation that never even knew him, Pfeiffer comes close.

Both Walter Pfeiffer and Welcome Aboard reaffirm that Pfeiffer's work both anticipated and paralleled that of the '80s photographers and, in so doing, looked ahead to much of what followed. So it would be possible to see his pictures laid end to end as a secret thread to the present. But art-historical detective work is in for a minor setback in chronicling all this: Pfeiffer rarely attaches a date to his photos. As he says, "I love to lock the pictures away for a while after I make them. I have a closer look at them later.., when I make an exhibition or a book." It's tempting to think he wants to preserve beauty exactly as it was in the moment the picture was taken-a portrait of Dorian Gray... painted by Pfeiffer's camera.

Welcome Aboard contains one early self-portrait, undated, in which a baby-faced Pfeiffer has opened a wooden cabinet to show off the pictures he's plastered on the inside of the door, as if in a school locker. Pages clipped from Physique Pictorial-shots of sunny California boys from the '6os in various states of undress-overlap with a postcard of marble statuary, the infamous photograph of Pete Rose grabbing his crotch in the middle of a baseball game, a kitten here and there, a man on water skis. It's a mini-archive of Pfeiffer and his obsessions. All these years later nothing much has changed.

Pfeiffer's first important showing was at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in 1974, in the "Transformer" exhibition, which overlaid art and the underground pop culture that was in many ways its inspiration-or at least its sound track. This kind of approach is commonplace today, but "Transformer" was mounted almost thirty years ago. The title was borrowed from Lou Reed's 1972 album, which contained his ode to the gender-bending life, "Walk on the Wild Side." The show brought together the work of artists who dealt with notions of sexual identity, with androgyny and drag, alongside images of David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Reed, whose appearance played on these associations. One of the inspirations for Reed's song was Warhol superstar Candy Darling, who died in the year of the show. In retrospect, the glamour of the "glam" era can be seen to go hand in hand with a deep sense of vulnerability and mortality. Pfeiffer's lasting contribution to "Transformer" is a photo essay (in the catalogue) devoted to a transsexual boy named Carlo, whom Pfeiffer photographed as both male and female. He would die suddenly at the age of nineteen.

When Pfeiffer was asked in an interview for the catalogue, "What inspired you to work with Carlo ?" he replied, "Probably I was just stunned by his beauty." When asked, "What is beauty to you?" he answered, "Let's say, the quality that in the age of classical painting compelled a painter to use a certain model." To the last question, "What direction will your future work take?" he said, "I would like to focus less on the person him/herself. Much rather I would like to use photography to incorporate their everyday life in my work, i.e., their habits, objects, and traces."