Walter Keller
1953-2014
In Memoriam

Walter Keller, publisher of SCALO and former partner at D.A.P., died at his home in Zurich, September 1, 2014.

Walter Keller was a great publisher and a complex man. As the Publisher of Scalo, he jolted the photography and publishing worlds to attention in the early 1990s with his distinctively pointed imprint.

The Scalo list was headlined by Robert Frank and Nan Goldin, of course, but he also championed Richard Billingham, Ute Behrend, William Eggleston, Seichi Furuya, Jim Goldberg, Paul Graham, Seydou Keita, Boris Mikhailov, Gilles Peress, Larry Sultan, and Jurgen Teller, among others. He conceived each book as a precisely targeted tactical missile that would explode the ideological scaffolding of a conventional way of seeing, of sentimentality, of "good taste.".

Just as the photographers whom Walter published challenged the way we see the world, so Walter himself, as a brilliant photo editor, challenged the way we look at photographs. Still today, his books refuse passive looking. They provoke us, sometimes even aggressively. As a publisher, he believed in the power of the image to sear us.

Brusque and prickly, Walter was the master of the tactical barb. He loved to argue and was at his best in an intellectual joust; and that is where he and I settled on our unique way of collaborating together during the early years of D.A.P., when he, Daniel Power and I were partners. Although our ways parted, we shared a vision of waking the publishing world up to the intellectual and political power of contemporary imagery and visual culture.

LINKS
Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen
Neue Zuricher Zeitung
Letter to the Viewer by Walter Keller