Bildrausch: Drawings 1966–2018

Bildrausch is the book that shows the other Walter Pfeiffer: not the photographer of Swiss youth and beauty but the draughtsman who came first and never stopped drawing.

Running to 492 pages and 380 colour plates, it gathers half a century of graphic work. The early 1970s brought large-scale hyper-realist pencil drawings that served as working models for the photographs, a manner that carried into his posters for the Zurich Filmpodium, magazine illustration and commissioned portraits. From the 1980s and through the 1990s, when he set photography aside for a time, Pfeiffer worked in China ink, coloured pencil and watercolour: portraits of beautiful boys and of the women friends around him, still lifes and flowers, drawn with a line that alternates between graphic reduction and a taste for ornament. Designed by Marietta Eugster with texts by Martin Jaeggi, it was named one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books of 2018.

Pfeiffer (b. 1946, Beggingen) trained as a window dresser and a graphic designer before turning to photography, self-taught, around 1972. Shown from 1974 in Transformer at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, he stayed an artist's artist until Welcome Aboard (2001) reached a wider public and led to work for i-D and Vogue. Edition Patrick Frey has published most of his books, among them Cherchez la femme!, Scrapbooks 1969–1985 and Chez Walti.