Walter Pfeiffer: UCC shows work of German photographer with an eye for Ireland
The work of Walter Pfeiffer is currently on display at UCC library.
When German photographer Walter Pfeiffer visited Ireland in the early 1960s, he fell in love with the countryside, transfixed in particular by the dramatic landscape of Connemara. He eventually moved to Ireland, settling in Wicklow and working as a commercial photographer for publications such as Vogue, shooting advertising campaigns for companies including Bord Bia and Dunnes, while his images of famous castles inspired a range of stamps for An Post.
But landscape photography was Pfeiffer’s true passion and when he died in 2017 at the age of 73, as well as the acclaimed publications Connemara and Beyond, and Connemara and Aran, he left behind a significant archive of slides, negatives, and some prints, which has now been acquired by UCC.
To mark the acquisition, UCC Library is hosting an exhibition of some of his Connemara images, curated by photographic collections librarian Barbara Diener. The recent launch was attended by Pfeiffer’s widow Valerie and his daughter Zianna.
Diener says that assessing and cataloguing all the material will be a massive task. “My best guess at the moment is that it's certainly over 10,000 negatives and slides, maybe even a bit more.”
She says it is planned to make as much of the work as possible available digitally. “In addition to the negatives, we received many boxes of CDs. Walter scanned a lot of his negatives during his lifetime, which is fantastic and will really help in guiding me as to what I'll prioritise as far as cataloging goes. And then also making it accessible, so that people can find it on our website or browse the catalogue.” The collection also contains landscape photographs of West Cork, as Pfeiffer and his family spent time around Bantry and the Sheep’s Head peninsula.
Diener decided to concentrate on the Connemara images for the exhibition because for her they evoked themes of German romanticism, which embraced a profound connection to nature, seeing it as a source of inspiration, beauty and spiritual renewal.
“When he mentions the regions that were most influential to him, Connemara has a kind of mystical hold on him. It felt like a good entry into the collection. I also chose landscapes for the exhibition that to me really resonate with German Romanticism, not just because he was originally German, but they really feel like someone going out into nature and being that lone figure trying to connect with nature and using it almost as a spiritual source.”
Given the often breathtaking scenery of the Irish countryside, there is no shortage of good landscape photography. What does Diener think makes Pfeiffer’s work so distinctive?
“He walks this really fine line between capturing the solitary landscape that feels lonely, but it really isn’t — you can tell that he took solace in that isolation. Every single landscape is so much about the light and the colour as well. You can tell that he waited for hours and hours to get that one moment where the light hits this small part of the landscape, just so.”
There is also a pleasing symmetry in Diener’s own work on the collection. This is her first major exhibition since taking up the role of photographic collections librarian in UCC only seven months ago. Originally from Germany herself, she lived in the US for 20 years, where she managed the photographic collections at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. Like Pfeiffer, her attraction to Ireland was strong and immediate.
“I first came to Ireland as a teenager with my parents, and instantly loved it. And then, eight years ago, my husband and I travelled to Ireland together for the first time, and then two more times since then. We were here last March and he just posed the question, ‘should we move here?’ I thought, ‘do you mean when we retire?’ My husband actually found the posting for this job at UCC library, I applied and here we are.”
Her goal is to find more ways to connect with academics and students, and also enhance access to the college’s expanding photographic collections, which also include the work of influential Irish photographers John Minihan and the New-York based Alen MacWeeney.
“There are a lot of possibilities for the different schools and departments here at UCC to utilise the Pfeiffer collection, for example. When I conceptualised it in the framework of German Romanticism, I reached out to the German department and I'm working on a potential event where they’ve invited a few poets to either find a poem they’ve written already, that could resonate with one of the photographs or hopefully, ideally, even write a new one."
The history department has also been interested. "I reached out to several historians who are looking at the land and agriculture and how the vegetation has really changed in these landscapes. So there's a lot of potential for research along those lines as well.”
- The Walter Pfeiffer exhibition is on in the Boole Library, UCC, until Jun 21, and is open to the public every day from 7.30am to 1.30pm
