Walter Pfeiffer - Cherchez la Femme - 2007

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Description from the seller

Zürich 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 facette 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-scène. 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.” (Martin Jaeggi)

Seller's Story

Dartbooks is a specialized photography bookshop based in Barcelona, dedicated to photobooks, rare and out-of-print editions, and historically significant publications. With a strong focus on Japanese photography, Dartbooks was founded to provide continuity to a field that requires depth, expertise, and careful curation. The bookshop was established after the closure of Kowasa, a landmark reference for photography books in Spain. Its disappearance left a clear gap for photographers, collectors, and institutions in need of a space with a serious and knowledgeable approach to the photobook. Dartbooks emerged in response to that need, not as a replacement, but as part of the natural evolution of a cultural ecosystem. Dartbooks operates with a curatorial mindset, shaped by long-term engagement with photography and book collecting. The project functions as a book hunting platform for collectors, professionals, and libraries worldwide, and also provides advisory support to other bookshops seeking to develop coherent and specialized photography collections. The catalogue includes new publications, rare and out-of-print titles, monographs, retrospectives, self-published works, signed copies, and editions produced directly by photographers through their own imprints. The selection reflects a sustained commitment to photography as a form of visual narration, where images construct meaning beyond text. Although rooted in the Gràcia neighbourhood of Barcelona, Dartbooks serves an international audience. Its community includes collectors, professionals, and institutions from France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and beyond, both through the physical space and the online platform. Dartbooks understands the photobook not merely as an object of consumption, but as a cultural artifact that documents artistic practices, historical contexts, and personal visions. The bookshop functions simultaneously as a place of discovery, an archive in constant growth, and a point of connection between photographers, publishers, and readers.

Zürich 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 facette 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-scène. 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.” (Martin Jaeggi)

Seller's Story

Dartbooks is a specialized photography bookshop based in Barcelona, dedicated to photobooks, rare and out-of-print editions, and historically significant publications. With a strong focus on Japanese photography, Dartbooks was founded to provide continuity to a field that requires depth, expertise, and careful curation. The bookshop was established after the closure of Kowasa, a landmark reference for photography books in Spain. Its disappearance left a clear gap for photographers, collectors, and institutions in need of a space with a serious and knowledgeable approach to the photobook. Dartbooks emerged in response to that need, not as a replacement, but as part of the natural evolution of a cultural ecosystem. Dartbooks operates with a curatorial mindset, shaped by long-term engagement with photography and book collecting. The project functions as a book hunting platform for collectors, professionals, and libraries worldwide, and also provides advisory support to other bookshops seeking to develop coherent and specialized photography collections. The catalogue includes new publications, rare and out-of-print titles, monographs, retrospectives, self-published works, signed copies, and editions produced directly by photographers through their own imprints. The selection reflects a sustained commitment to photography as a form of visual narration, where images construct meaning beyond text. Although rooted in the Gràcia neighbourhood of Barcelona, Dartbooks serves an international audience. Its community includes collectors, professionals, and institutions from France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and beyond, both through the physical space and the online platform. Dartbooks understands the photobook not merely as an object of consumption, but as a cultural artifact that documents artistic practices, historical contexts, and personal visions. The bookshop functions simultaneously as a place of discovery, an archive in constant growth, and a point of connection between photographers, publishers, and readers.

Details

Number of books
1
Subject
Photography
Book title
Cherchez la Femme
Author/ Illustrator
Walter Pfeiffer
Condition
As new
Publication year oldest item
2007
Height
26 cm
Edition
1st Edition
Width
19 cm
Language
English
Original language
Yes
Publisher
Editions Patrick Frey
Binding/ Material
Hardback
Number of pages
188
Sold by
SpainVerified
673
Objects sold
100%
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