Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2013. Ink jet on 180 gram matte paper. 120 x 80 cm Edition 1/5. Courtesy Galerie Sultana, Paris. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013
“Being a man means: being funny, and not boring. Some kind of reliable. Some kind of playful, and curious. And to try things out.” Walter Pfeiffer
Interview by Kevin Braddock
Masculinity was kind of an obsession for me. I mean, I’ve done it since 40 years ago, and I didn’t change a lot. Mostly I am interested in nudity, or I always was, because this is the most difficult to do. Portraiture is nice but nudity is more dangerous – or not dangerous because now you have so many things on the net which are always the same. I want to do something not too similar to those cheap pictures. Sometimes there are nice things I see, but I always thought, Oh such a beauty, why didn’t they make better things out of if? I wouldn’t let it go like this.
I like the conquering I have to wait and fight – I like that part of the game, waiting for the right moment to arrive. Environment is important too, and I have to have the right surrounding. The surrounding gives me the idea and the model should encourage me.
Intimacy is the most important thing. You see, the difference is if I work for a magazine, they give me the super-super-models. With the boys it is so different. If I work for myself it has to be the one I go crazy [about]. If he embraces me too much, I couldn’t work.
With men, the camera is a kind of a tool. In the earlier days, when I started as an artist, I always fell in love immediately; everything went wrong, and it was only failure. When I started to photograph them as models, it was much better. I had this tool and I could direct them, I started to have a kind of relationship with them – it gets stronger and stronger.
Sometimes you see incredible beauties, but the beauty is so quickly gone – the innocence of that beauty. Sometimes it holds longer, but sometimes I wonder if they eat too much, or if it’s drugs – and it’s gone.
Did you see my scrapbook? I threw lots of things away but I had pages of runners or cyclists. Sometimes in the earlier days they had shorts like this [gestures to the upper thigh] so you saw whole leg, those beautiful legs – football legs. But now, I didn’t know, it’s different. Now they are more feminine, like Justin Bieber.
Swimmers. Are they aware of the beauty of their bodies?
Masculine beauty is really male. I love the kind of age when they go to the military. After the military they are changed. Now it’s over, like something had operated on the, something taken out. Yes, I love this innocence.
I’m not crazy about famous people – I love the men of the street. Not elegant like Paris, not crazy like London, but maybe London oriented a little bit more. Tough. And nobody cares about whether your boots match your sweater. Here [in Berlin] I see so many men and it’s always the same kind – sensuous, not too feminine, not androgynous.
The difference between a man and a boy is that a boy has to learn. I’m kind of a teacher, I taught in schools and I love to teach boys. But with the men, maybe I have better talks, and he is kind of sensual, and maybe he knows the world. But boys can be funny.
The idea of a real man, like the Marlboro man, is gone. Nobody wants it like this. Even those hero kind of things. I saw this movie yesterday about Iran with Ben Affleck [“Argo”]. How terrible he is. He had one face, one expression, and played very masculine. I thought, is this Ben Affleck that everyone is raving about? It’s terrible, that kind of masculinity I hate. The real hero is not showing that you are the hero.
All images from Walter Pfeiffer’s series shown at Art Berlin Contemporary, October 2013
Taken from Sleek 40 “Man/Boy”