Exhibitions

Walter Schels. 16° Fische + The Lure of the Image

Berlin, Germany

Faces, animals, mortality, digital seduction — two exhibitions in Berlin asking why images still hold us, disturb us, and refuse to let us look away.

photo

Image credit

Tom, 18 Jahre, 2016, a.d.S. Trans* © Walter Schels / Stiftung F.C. Gundlach

Meet the artist

Walter Schels

The Movement

Contemporary photography

ArtLovers Tip

Visit time / Density: Dense if you see both exhibitions. Allow at least 90 minutes. If you want to spend time with Schels’ 300+ works and then properly absorb The Lure of the Image, give it 2 hours.

A must-see Berlin photography stop: one exhibition gives you the depth of a lifetime behind the camera; the other confronts the seductive, unstable power of images today.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Walter Schels. 16° Fische is the first major Berlin retrospective of photographer Walter Schels, presented for his 90th birthday by C/O Berlin and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation. The exhibition brings together more than 300 works spanning almost seven decades, with a special focus on experimental and transformative works that have rarely been shown before.

Schels is known for his intense black-and-white portraits: newborns, centenarians, famous and unknown faces, animals, plants, and people at the edge of life. His work is direct, psychological and existential — photography as a meeting with presence, vulnerability and time. The title 16° Fische refers to his birth constellation: the sun stood at sixteen degrees in Pisces when he was born, a poetic self-definition linked to sensibility, intuition and openness to transformation.

Alongside it, The Lure of the Image shifts the focus to the present: how images seduce us in digital space, how they guide attention, provoke emotion and influence opinion. It features fourteen artists exploring the mechanisms of visual attraction, manipulation and attention in contemporary image culture.

Worth the trip

Because these two shows work beautifully together.

Schels asks us to look slowly — at age, face, animal presence, mortality and the vulnerability of being alive. The Lure of the Image asks what happens when looking becomes accelerated, monetised and manipulated by digital systems.

For Artlovers, this pairing is worth seeing because it creates a powerful contrast: the image as encounter versus the image as seduction. One exhibition slows the gaze down; the other makes you question who or what is controlling it.

How to experience it

Start with Walter Schels.

Let the portraits reset your eye. Look at the faces, the animals, the stillness, the silence. Then move into The Lure of the Image and notice the shift: from intimate photographic presence to contemporary visual pressure.

This is a great Berlin stop if you care about photography not only as beauty, but as ethics: how we look, why we look, and what images do to us.

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