Walter Keller – Beruf: Verleger

Walter Keller founded the cultural magazine Der Alltag— Sensationen des Gewöhnlichen in 1978 with Nikolaus Wyss, the art magazine Parkett in 1984 together with Bice Curiger, Jacqueline Burckhardt and Peter Blum, the photobook publishing house Scalo—Books and Looks in 1991, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in 1993. An impressive palmarès, to be sure, and yet it pales beside the exuberant creativity, curiosity, inspiration and energy with which for nearly forty years Walter Keller fascinated, nonplussed and motivated friends and foes alike, journalists and gallerists, curators and photographers, graphic designers and collectors—and often nearly drove them to distraction with his relentless tenacity.

On the night of September 1, 2014, Walter Keller died all of a sudden in the midst of preparing exhibitions on Dürrenmatt and the Cold War, as well as on contemporary Chinese photography and a thousand other ideas.

Walter Keller was a publisher, motivator, magazine maker, coach and networker. But above all he was an adorable friend and rousing companion. This book does not seek to explore or explain what he did, but how and why he turned his surroundings into exhibits in his very own world’s fair.

Edited, backed, curated, written and produced by people whose lives were changed and enriched by Walter Keller, this book is not a chronology of Walter Keller’s work, but an impressionistic patchwork, a subjective selection of testaments to his unbridled originality.