Walter Schels' work has unfolded for almost seven decades between documentation and transformation, between formal rigor and experimental playfulness. Schels is best known as an empathetic portraitist: With his reduced visual language, he explores the essence of his subjects. Whether an infant or an old man, an elephant or a faded flower – at the heart of his documentary portrait series and long-term studies are existential themes such as identity, birth, and death.

In contrast, his experimental work has received little attention so far: With overpaintings, double exposures, collages, or polarizations, he pushes the boundaries into the painterly realm. Schels understands photography as an open process. "A picture is never finished," he says – and by that, he means not only an artistic attitude but the concrete material process: In the red light of the darkroom, Schels says, he experiences the world.

16° Pisces brings together both halves of his oeuvre for the first time. In addition to the portraits, the volume presents experimental discoveries that complete the view of photographer Walter Schels – from transformed cityscapes of 1960s New York to series he himself describes as "waste images," to current abstract works with photochemicals and plant fragments.

And like the collected works, the title is a poetic self-localization: When Schels was born in Landshut in 1936, the sun was in the zodiac sign Pisces – at 16 degrees. Schels derives the basic traits of his artistic temperament from this constellation: sensitivity, intuition, imagination, and an inexhaustible interest in people.

Walter Schels, born in Landshut in 1936, is one of Germany's most influential portraitists. From 1957 to 1965, he worked as a window dresser in Barcelona, Toronto, and Geneva before moving to New York as a self-taught artist to become a photographer. In 1970, he returned to Germany and opened a studio in Munich. Until the mid-1990s, he worked for advertising clients such as BMW, Pan Am, and Deutsche Post, as well as for magazines such as Stern, Annabelle, Eltern, and ZEITmagazin. At the same time, he produced independent works. From the mid-1980s onwards, his black-and-white portraits became well-known; in particular, his documentary long-term studies and portrait series reached a broad audience. Schels' works have received numerous awards and have been exhibited both in Germany and abroad.

Edited by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation

280 pages, 310 illustrations

Hardcover / Half-linen
24 x 29 cm

German / English

ISBN 978-3-96999-559-4
1st Edition 06/2026