For nearly seven decades now, Walter Schels' work has straddled the lines between documentation and transformation, between formal rigor and an experimental spirit. Schels is best-known as an empathetic portraitist, one who explores the essence of his subjects in a minimalistic visual language. Whether young or old, elephant or wilted flower—at the heart of his portraits and long-term studies lie existential themes such as identity, birth and death. Schels' experimental work, however, has been comparatively overlooked: through overpainting, double-exposure, collage and polarization, he has increasingly moved into the realm of painting. Indeed Schels views photography as a changeable, open-ended process: "An image is never finished," he says, referencing both his creative stance and the infinite possibilities of the darkroom. Walter Schels 16° Pisces. Photographs 1958-2026 brings together both halves of Schels' œuvre for the first time. Here we discover his acclaimed portraits alongside cutting-edge images including reshaped cityscapes of 1960s New York and recent abstractions using photographic chemicals and plant fragments. The book's title, not unlike its content, is poetic self-reflection: on the day of Schels' birth in 1960, the sun was in Pisces at precisely 16 degrees. From this constellation he has defined his artistic temperament: one of sensitivity, intuition, imagination, and an inexhaustible curiosity for his subjects.
For nearly seven decades now, Walter Schels' work has straddled the lines between documentation and transformation, between formal rigor and an experimental spirit. Schels is best-known as an empathetic portraitist, one who explores the essence of his subjects in a minimalistic visual language. Whether young or old, elephant or wilted flower—at the heart of his portraits and long-term studies lie existential themes such as identity, birth and death. Schels' experimental work, however, has been comparatively overlooked: through overpainting, double-exposure, collage and polarization, he has increasingly moved into the realm of painting. Indeed Schels views photography as a changeable, open-ended process: "An image is never finished," he says, referencing both his creative stance and the infinite possibilities of the darkroom. Walter Schels 16° Pisces. Photographs 1958-2026 brings together both halves of Schels' œuvre for the first time. Here we discover his acclaimed portraits alongside cutting-edge images including reshaped cityscapes of 1960s New York and recent abstractions using photographic chemicals and plant fragments. The book's title, not unlike its content, is poetic self-reflection: on the day of Schels' birth in 1960, the sun was in Pisces at precisely 16 degrees. From this constellation he has defined his artistic temperament: one of sensitivity, intuition, imagination, and an inexhaustible curiosity for his subjects.
Über den Autor
Walter Schels, born in Landshut in 1936, is one of Germany's most influential portrait photographers. From 1957 to 1965 he worked as a window dresser in Barcelona, Toronto and Geneva before moving to New York as a self-taught photographer. Schels returned to Germany in 1970 and opened a studio in Munich. Until the mid-1990s he worked for clients including BMW, Pan Am and Deutsche Post, and for magazines such as Stern, Annabelle, Eltern and ZEITmagazin. Parallel Schels produced independent work; from the mid-1980s his black-and-white portraits gained an increasingly wide audience, particularly his long-term documentary studies and portrait series. Schels' photography has received numerous awards and has been exhibited internationally
