Eye Contact

German photographer Walter Schels (b. 1936) spent his childhood surrounded by animals – an experience he believes has profoundly shaped both his relationship with the animal world, and his subsequent work as a photographer. His first animal portraits date back to the 1980s, when leading brands such as VW, Panasonic or Blaupunkt commissioned him to capture dogs or chimpanzees for their advertising campaigns – often in funny poses, and almost always in colour. In the course of these projects, he ‘secretly’ produced additional black-and-white shots.

Later he began to portray animals even without assignments, and continued to do so all the way into the 2000s. Schels is best-known for his character studies of public figures such as Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys or Angela Merkel – always depicted against a black studio background, unsmiling and looking directly into the camera. “The fact that he simply transferred a stylistic convention from the human portrait to animal photography is a provocation,” photography historian Klaus Honnef explains. The resulting images allow the viewer to enter into a dialogue (literally at eye level) with the subject, be it a sheep, bunny, bear or frog. This is very much intentional: eye contact, Schels maintains, is a way to access the essence of the protagonist – in other words, the key to a good portrait. However, seeing as you can hardly instruct an animal to gaze into the camera, animal portraits are also “a matter of luck” and serendipity. 

In this upcoming exhibition, the Noir Blanche Gallery complements Schels’ animal portraits with a collection of experimental and ‘imperfect’ images, which the photographer has accumulated since the seventies: double exposures, snapshots, as well as excerpts from a series he created in 1976 in Munich’s snow-covered English Garden. The series was shot with a small plastic camera that came as a free gimmick with the popular kids’ magazine YPS: the editorial office had asked Schels to be a test photographer – another case of luck and serendipity.