In Love with Beauty offers an unprecedented chronological overview of the legendary Walter Pfeiffer, spanning four decades of photographic eroticism and wit, classical serenity and ornamental playfulness, artifice and immediacy. Initially a painter, draughtsman and graphic designer, Pfeiffer used photographs as aide-memoirs for large-scale Photorealist pencil drawings, but quickly developed a genuine passion for photography and, inspired by a Warholesque cast of handsome drifters and stylish women, began to evolve a trademark style. His breakthrough as a photographer came with a series of images of a young man in drag that was included in Jean-Christophe Amman's seminal Transformer exhibition of 1974, which year also saw Pfeiffer's first solo photo exhibition, reproduced here for the first time. His eponymous 1981 monograph conveyed a cheeky eroticism and a raw immediacy well suited to the Punk movement, also prefiguring the diaristic photography of the 1990s. For most of the 1980s,...