In 1981, he published his book Walter Pfeiffer. Its cheeky eroticism and raw immediacy was in perfect tune with the Punk / New Wave movement, while prefiguring the diary-like, ostentatiously unpretentious approach to photography that would become popular in the 1990s. For most of the 1980s, Pfeiffer embarked on a quest for male beauty that culminated in “Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd”, a 1986 series of b/w close-up portraits of young men, whose elegant reduction was the result of years of study and experimentation. Pfeiffer then dedicated himself to drawing for a number of years, only to return to photography in the late 1990s. In 2001, he published Welcome Aboard, an overview of recent and past photographs, which proved that he has remained as youthful and exuberant as ever. In recent years, he has ceaselessly refined his approach to photography and has worked for international magazines such as i-D, Achtung, Butt, the German edition of Vanity Fair, Officiel, Têtu, and Out Magazine.