Double Vision at C/O Berlin: Walter Schels’s Seventy Years and the Allure of the Image
What does it feel like to review hundreds of thousands of prints and choose three hundred? That’s the challenge the curators of Walter Schels’s retrospective at C/O Berlin faced — and the result is a distillation of the Hamburg archive of one of Germany’s most important photographers, seen at this scale for the very first time. At the same address, a second show is asking a different but equally pressing question: in the digital age, what does an image make us do?
16° Pisces: A Photographer’s Birth Constellation and Legacy
The title *16° Fische. Retrospective* might seem cryptic at first. *Fische* is German for Pisces — the birth constellation of Walter Schels: the sun was at exactly sixteen degrees in Pisces when he was born. This poetic self-definition encapsulates his entire artistic sensibility: sensitivity, intuition, a sustained attention to fundamental human questions.
Born in Landshut in 1936, Schels came to photography on the streets of New York. Returning to Germany in 1970, he turned his lens toward life’s most extreme thresholds — from newborns to centenarians, from animals and flowers to famous faces. Joseph Beuys, Angela Merkel, the Dalai Lama all sat for Schels. But the retrospective’s real surprise is the work never before exhibited: experimental photographs from 1960s and ’70s New York, analog photomontages, double and overexposures — surreal urban landscapes that interrogate the relationship between the individual and the city.
Transformation as Theme and Method
For Schels, a picture is never finished. He overpainted, solarised, and collaged his prints, pushing photography toward painting. In his most recent abstract works he works directly with photo chemicals and plant fragments, making the material process itself the subject. The retrospective makes something clear that has gone largely unnoticed: Schels has always run on two parallel tracks simultaneously — the celebrated black-and-white portraitist and the quietly radical experimentalist. Seen together for the first time, they transform how we understand the photographer entirely.
Curated by Sophia Greiff (C/O Berlin) with Beate Lakotta, Sebastian Lux, and Franziska Mecklenburg (F.C. Gundlach Foundation), and accompanied by a Steidl publication, this is the first retrospective of Schels’s work in Berlin — a celebration, also, of his ninetieth birthday.
“Blind”, “Noch mal leben”, “Trans*”: At the Edges of Human Existence
Schels’s long-term series have drawn sustained critical attention. *Blind* documents blind individuals; *Noch mal leben* (Live Again) records the final moments before death; *Trans** traces the transformations of trans people over time. Each is an act of sustained photographic witnessing at the limit zones of human life, conducted against a neutral background that grants each subject their full autonomy and presence. A World Press Photo Award (2004) and a Hansel Mieth Prize (2003) are among the recognitions his work has earned, though the archive’s reach extends far beyond any award.
In the Same Building: “The Lure of the Image”
C/O Berlin’s other gallery this summer hums with a different question entirely: how do online images bait, beguile, and control us? *The Lure of the Image* brings together fourteen artists engaging with visual phenomena that drive online communication, humour, and manipulation. Organised by Marco De Mutiis, Doris Gassert, and Alessandra Nappo (Fotomuseum Winterthur), and adapted by Boaz Levin for C/O Berlin, the show spans social media feeds, dating app profiles, beauty filters, memes, ASMR videos, emojis, CGI, and conspiracy-adjacent pixelated screenshots.
Zoé Aubry’s *#Ingrid* (2022) archives a digital protest movement that replaced degrading images of a crime with collective dignified memory. Viktoria Binschtok’s precise still-life photographs in *Digital Semiotics* (2024–25) lay bare the cultural and political implications of the emoji. Hito Steyerl, Jon Rafman, Noura Tafeche, and Dina Kelberman — whose *The Wave* (2025) condenses thousands of soothing ASMR clips into an overwhelming audio-visual environment — round out a genuinely surprising group.
Seeing both shows under the same roof is not coincidence but a quietly pointed juxtaposition. On one side: seven decades of observational patience, black-and-white concentration, analogue craft. On the other: the instant, manipulable flow of screen light. C/O Berlin this summer interrogates both the depth of history and the surface of the now.
FAQ: C/O Berlin Summer 2026 Exhibitions
- When can I see the Walter Schels retrospective?
Both *16° Fische. Retrospective* and *The Lure of the Image* run from 20 June to 2 September 2026 at C/O Berlin, Hardenbergstraße 22–24, 10623 Berlin. The gallery is open daily 11:00–20:00.
- How much are tickets?
Regular admission is €15, reduced €8, Kulturzugang €4. Under 18 is free. Weekend and weekday public guided tours are included in the admission ticket — in German at 14:00 and in English at 15:30 on Saturdays and Sundays.
- How long do I need for both exhibitions?
Allow at least two hours to move comfortably through both shows. Walter Schels’s retrospective alone spans more than 300 works; *The Lure of the Image* rewards close, slow attention.
NO-26 Note
A rare chance to see seven decades of an experimental photographic archive alongside an unflinching take on digital image culture — in the same building, on the same afternoon. Schels’s previously unseen New York work surfaces here for the first time; on 2 September, it goes back into the dark.
