A Quote by Walter Pfeiffer

Things changed a little when I started taking photographs for magazines. I was afraid in the beginning. I thought, "Oh I can't do it, because I have never taken a photographs commercially for a magazine." But I wanted to learn so I started. But when I took models from agencies, I took beginners. Sometimes they were really good, but you have to work with them. You have to be good with women and the boys.
Saudi Arabia is so conservative. At first there were photographs of women I took that I couldn't publish - of women without their abayas. So I started writing out little anecdotes about things I couldn't photograph and wove it in with a more obscure picture and called it "moments that got away". I realised these worked as well as the photographs by themselves. There are a lot of photographers who feel the story is all in the photographs but I really believe in weaving in complementary words with the pictures.
I started out, in the mid-'70s, taking photographs of rock bands that I liked but not because I really wanted to photograph them. Initially, I was pretending to be a photographer, simply so that I could go up to the front of the crowd and be a bit closer to the bands. But, I found I was gradually developing an interest in the photos I took.
I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.
I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were.
I was out in California over the holidays and I was working with some photographs I took out there just now, actually, which were all different photographs of the sunset. They're really interesting because El Niño has changed the cloud configuration, not only the sea, but also the whole makeup of the clouds, the sunset, and the different gradations of color and tonality. So it'll be interesting to work with that.
I started out as a fashion photographer. One cannot say that I was successful but there was enough work to keep me busy. I collaborated with Harper's Bazaar and other magazines. I was constantly aware that those who hired me would have preferred to work with a star such as Avedon. But it didn't matter. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs. Strangely enough, I knew exactly what I wanted and what I liked.
I never looked at magazines before I started modeling. I was 13 or 14 and none of my friends were into magazines. We were into the fashion of the day, though. Designer jeans were really popular - Sasson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Calvin Klein, Jordache. Once I started modeling, I began to learn about these things, and magazines helped me to understand who was who.
I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back.
It wasn't until I realised that I could actually take nice photographs that I started to become passionate about it. I then got a few jobs working for magazines in London, and I would get terribly excited and intense about doing a job and taking photographs and looking through the lens to capture something amazing.
I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.
I have photographs taken of me at the time I was addicted, and thought I looked good. I see them today and realize my eyes were dead.
I was dyslexic as a child and it took me years to get passed that. I read a lot but it was hard and that didn't go away until my early-to-mid-twenties. So really what I was looking at were the photographs and the illustrations in magazines.
A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.
I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem... And then it actually wasn't so bad.
It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."
I wanted to learn a little bit about acting, not because I thought I'd find a star vehicle and set the world on fire, but I thought the discipline of it would be good for me. I met a good coach, and I joined her class - with a lot of hungry young actors who really didn't acre if I was a rock 'n' roll singer or not. I started to learn to get a focus, without having to jump up and down every few seconds.
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