Walter Schels Germany, b. 1936

Walter Schels was born in 1936 in Landshut, southern Germany, the youngest of six children. Between 1957 and 1965 he worked as a window dresser in Barcelona, Toronto, and Geneva, an itinerant early life that sharpened his observational instincts before he had any formal photographic training. In 1966 he moved to New York, where, as he has described it, he was a complete beginner with a Leica around his neck, walking through Manhattan and keeping a visual diary of the city. There he discovered street photography and began experimenting with the medium from the outset, treating experimentation as an integral part of his practice. In 1970 he returned to Germany, opening his own studio and working as a sought-after commercial photographer for campaigns by L'Oréal, Lufthansa, and Deutsche Post, and for magazines including "Stern," "Elle," "Playboy," and "Bunte." A commission from the magazine "Eltern" in 1974, for which he photographed a birth, proved formative: it opened his sustained engagement with the human face and with the extreme situations of human life.

Schels' artistic practice is defined by an unflinching yet deeply respectful attention to his subjects. He photographs people, animals, and plants with equal seriousness, approaching each as a portrait subject with its own interiority and dignity. His black-and-white portraits of cultural and political figures, including Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Angela Merkel, Helmut Schmidt, Yehudi Menuhin, and the Dalai Lama, established him as a master of the genre. His animal portraits, which treat their subjects with the same psychological seriousness as his human sitters, attracted international attention and were embraced by fashion designer Tory Burch, who incorporated them into her store concepts in Los Angeles and Paris. Schels also views photography as a material practice: through overpainting, solarization, double exposure, and the use of photographic chemicals, he consistently pushes beyond the documentary into the realm of painting and abstraction. "An image is never finished," he has said. "The darkroom is where I gain insight into the world."

His most celebrated body of work, "Life Before Death" ("Noch mal leben"), was created in collaboration with journalist Beate Lakotta over more than a year spent in hospices in northern Germany. The project produced portraits of 26 people photographed shortly before and after their death, accompanied by Lakotta's recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days. When the series was published in Germany in 2004 and subsequently exhibited internationally, it generated extraordinary public and critical response, including the Guardian's busiest website day on record at the time of publication. The project earned Schels the Hansel Mieth Prize for engaged reportage, the World Press Photo Award (second prize, Contemporary Issues, 2003), a gold medal from the Art Directors Club Germany, and a Lead Award for Portrait Photograph of the Year from the Akademie für neue Bildsprache (2004). A long-term follow-up project, "trans*," created again with Beate Lakotta, accompanied young transgender people over several years through the process of gender transition, and was exhibited and published to wide critical recognition.

Schels' photographs are held in major international collections and have been shown at institutions including the Wellcome Collection, London; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, where his work appeared in the exhibition "Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love"; the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Internationales Haus der Photographie, where a major retrospective "Walter Schels. Leben" was presented in 2019; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt; and C/O Berlin. He has lived and worked in Hamburg since 1990. His extensive publication history includes numerous monographs and modular work catalogues published by Fotografenverlag, covering his portrait, animal, flower, street photography, and documentary series.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has presented Walter Schels' work in Berlin, including the solo exhibition "TRANS" at 68projects by KORNFELD in summer 2021, and a curated selection of works at 69salon by KORNFELD. The gallery has been a consistent partner in bringing Schels' practice to collectors and audiences in the capital, presenting a body of work that, across more than five decades, has lost none of its formal rigour or its capacity to move.