The first ever overview of Pfeiffer's lively artistic output across mediums from the 1960s to the present, from A to Z Inspired by the illustrated alphabets found in abecedariums, this new book on Walter Pfeiffer (born 1946) presents playful and illuminating insights into the Swiss artist's practice from A to Z, annotated by Pfeiffer himself. The book also features new texts reflecting on five decades of Pfeiffer's artistic output from an international group of curators, critics and writers. At once a meticulously crafted artist's book and a comprehensive monograph, Walter Pfeiffer demonstrates the artist's sustained commitment to exquisite, innovative publications. This book is part of Swiss Institute's newly redesigned SI Series. Each book in the SI Series adds context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts.

In Love with Beauty offers an unprecedented chronological overview of the legendary Walter Pfeiffer, spanning four decades of photographic eroticism and wit, classical serenity and ornamental playfulness, artifice and immediacy. Initially a painter, draughtsman and graphic designer, Pfeiffer used photographs as aide-memoirs for large-scale Photorealist pencil drawings, but quickly developed a genuine passion for photography and, inspired by a Warholesque cast of handsome drifters and stylish women, began to evolve a trademark style. His breakthrough as a photographer came with a series of images of a young man in drag that was included in Jean-Christophe Amman's seminal Transformer exhibition of 1974, which year also saw Pfeiffer's first solo photo exhibition, reproduced here for the first time. His eponymous 1981 monograph conveyed a cheeky eroticism and a raw immediacy well suited to the Punk movement, also prefiguring the diaristic photography of the 1990s. For most of the 1980s, Pfeiffer immersed himself in the project that culminated in Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd, a series of close-up portraits of young men. Pfeiffer dedicated himself to drawing for a number of years, returning to photography only in the late 1990s. In Love with Beauty proves that he has remained as youthful and exuberant as ever.

Walter Pfeiffer, whose work in the 1970s and 1980s prefigured many of the decisive developments in contemporary art today, is a classic artist's artist--famous and beloved among art aficionados, yet almost forgotten by the public at large. Now, it's the time to discover him as his images seem timelier than ever. Welcome Aboard! Photographs 1980-2000 is, at the same time, a monograph on Pfeiffer's photographic work and an artist's book, a photo-novel all of its own. Pfeiffer takes you on a long trip from suburban bliss to the horse race at Ascot, from wind-swept beaches to majestic mountain tops. Pfeiffer knows our dreams and artfully plays with them. In his still lives, landscapes, and portraits of beautiful boys and mischievous women, Pfeiffer celebrates his quest for beauty and glamour with sophistication, irony, and wit. Pfeiffer leads you in a world between reality and reverie, snapshot and mise-en-scene. It's a photo album from Arcadia. With simple means Pfeiffer creates intelligent and classic images of beauty and bliss, imbued with a wistful awareness of their artifice. Stylish, suggestive, and erotic, his images are an encyclopedia of desire.

In the second book from EPF on Zu'rich-based photographer and graphic artist Walter Pfeiffer (b. 1946), the artists little-known drawings, long overshadowed by his commercial and homoerotic photographic works, have finally come to light. Pfeiffers large-scale hyperrealistic pencil drawings from the 1970s served as points of departure and working models for many of his photographs and eventually gave rise to his legendary posters for the Zu'rich Filmpodium, magazine illustrations and commissioned portraits. Originally trained as a draftsman, Pfeiffer used China ink, colored pencil and watercolor to draw beautiful boys, women friends, still lifes and flowers in the 1980s and 90s. Characterized by a cheerful, wakeful sensuality, the drawings alternate between graphic reduction and rich ornamentation. Drawings follows Pfeiffers encyclopedic publication, Welcome Aboard Photographs 19802000 (EPF, 2001). His work can be found in the collections of Kunsthaus Zu'rich, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Bundeskunstsammlung Bern, the Windsor Collection and Sir Elton John Photography Collection, among others.