C/O Berlin presents the exhibition Walter Schels . 16° Fische . Retrospective from Jun 20 to Sep 2, 2026. The opening takes place at C/O Berlin in Amerika Haus on Friday, Jun 19, 2026, at 20:00.

In celebration of Walter Schels’s ninetieth birthday, C/O Berlin and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation presents the photographer’s first retrospective in Berlin. With more than three hundred works, the exhibition offers new insights into his oeuvre, which spans nearly seven decades.

The exhibition brings together key series and focuses on an overlooked part of Schels’s oeuvre that consists of a large body of experimental works and transformatory approaches that have shaped Schels’s photographic practice. This new discovery will cast the photographer in new light. The works in the exhibition were selected during a review of several thousand prints from the photographer’s archive, which is kept and made accessible by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation.

Schels has oscillated between documentary and artistic photography since the late 1960s. He became especially known for his black-and-white portraits using a characteristically reduced and strongly consolidated visual language that he has developed since the 1980s. In long-term studies and portrait series such as Blind, Noch mal leben (Live Again), and trans*, he explores fundamental questions of human existence, investigating presence and perception, identity and existential transitions. Schels focuses on candid expression—ranging from the faces of newborns and centenarians to famous people such as the Dalai Lama and unknown people, as well as animals and plants. Shooting against a neutral background, he captures encounters with independent subjects that have an immediate impact.

The exhibition invites visitors to reread Schels’s famous portraits and series in light of the other part of his oeuvre, which was created at the same time but has never been shown before.

The series that he created in New York in the 1960s and 1970s serve as an early starting point for Schels’s double-track approach. In addition to street photography, he took close-ups of manhole covers, transforming a purportedly functional object into an independent visual language. Views of skyscrapers are condensed using analog photo montage, double exposure, and overexposure, creating surreal urban landscapes that explore the relationship between the individual and the city.

For Schels, a picture is never finished. Transformation is both a content-related motif and an artistic method. By using overpainting, solarization, and collage, he pushes the limits of photography into the realm of painting—leading up to his current abstract works in which he works directly with photo chemicals and plant fragments to make the materiality of the photographic process into his subject.

Whenever possible, the presentation includes original hand-printed photographs such as large-format sponge-developed prints and prints that Schels reworked time and again over the years with various techniques.

The exhibition title 16° Fische (Pisces) refers to Schels’s birth constellation: The sun stood at sixteen degrees in the zodiac sign of Pisces when he was born. This poetic self-definition is a way for the artist to link characteristics such as sensibility and intuition, reflecting his interest in people and existential topics. Walter Schels views his work as an open process, and the retrospective Walter Schels . 16° Fische invites viewers to continue looking. Curated by Sophia Greiff (C/O Berlin) and Beate Lakotta, Sebastian Lux, and Franziska Mecklenburg (F.C. Gundlach Foundation).

A publication accompanying the exhibition is available from Steidl.

Walter Schels

Walter Schels (b. 1936 in Landshut, Germany) is one of Germany’s most important photographers. After early stints as a window decorator in Barcelona, Geneva, and Toronto, he began to focus on photography in New York. When he returned to Germany in 1970, he became known for his impressive portraits of famous people such as Joseph Beuys, Angela Merkel, and the Dalai Lama, as well as animals and flowers. He created numerous photographic series and long-term projects that reflect his documentary interest in extreme situations of human life. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the Hansel Mieth Prize (2003) and the World Press Photo Award (2004). His photographs are represented in important collections and have been featured in exhibitions all around the world—including at the Wellcome Collection in London (2008), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2009), and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2022). Walter Schels has been based in Hamburg since 1990.