Bringing together more than one hundred works spanning from the 1970s to the present, In Good Company, at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, is the first survey of Walter Pfeiffer’s photography in Italy. The exhibition traces an oeuvre driven by an insatiable appetite for subjects and genre experimentation. Across portraits, still lifes, fashion editorials, erotic studies, and accumulations of everyday objects, Pfeiffer’s work eludes hierarchy and collapses distinctions between glamour and banality. Mundane objects are transformed into playful compositions with childlike intensity. Flowers, souvenirs, fragments of bodies, cats and food are staged with equal eagerness. Faces are cropped, flashes overexpose skin, compositions tilt toward imbalance. Yet these imperfections never weaken the work’s sensuous crookedness; they support its unusual vitality.

In Good Company draws out the sexual dimension of photographs which might not be overtly erotic and juxtaposes them to openly pornographic shots. These, in turn, end up appearing more candid than a portrait of a cat meowing for milk, or a hot dog on a paper plate. Every subject here is an allusion. Pfeiffer approaches beauty with both devotion and irony; what remains withheld is just as powerful as what he displays. He pursues subjects whose beauty remains fundamentally unattainable, even when captured. The camera becomes a way of lingering near what couldn’t ever be possessed. Pfeiffer’s eye chases what he pegged El Dorado: unexpected encounters with surprise and seduction, a guiding principle when casting young men on the streets of Zurich and Paris, flirting with chance. His production was shaped by the communities and relationships surrounding him: from his earlier portrayals of queer youth to his later work in fashion photography. Yet his subjects never appear fully stabilized. Identity in Pfeiffer’s images is always performative and provisional. He understood photography as a collaborative performance between photographer and subject, mediated through desire, humor, and display. Kitschy, flashy, colorful Helvetic glamour, as the curators call it, crystallizes a vision of identity in which bodies are sites for self-invention.

Curated by Nicola Trezzi and Simon Castets, the exhibition embraces Pfeiffer’s sensibility through associative juxtapositions that privilege visual resonance over linear chronology. Mirroring Pfeiffer’s own practice of assembling scrapbooks and image clusters, the installation constructs what the exhibition describes as an atlas of desire: a visual system governed by repetition, formal echoes, and emotional continuity. Underlying the apparent spontaneity of the images is a rigorous attention to rhythm, repetition, and compositional structure. Works produced decades apart are placed in dialogue through compositional rhymes and humorous correspondences. Fashion editorials are placed alongside intimate portraits, still lifes beside erotic studies, revealing the reciprocal influence between commissioned and independent work. What emerges is a portrait of the photographer’s worldview, where his apparent contradictions are held together by a distinct emotional buoyancy. Pfeiffer’s images remain suspended between anti-heroic spontaneity and meticulous composition, revealing a practice where contradiction itself becomes an aesthetic principle.