Walter Schels, born in Landshut in 1936, is one of Germany’s most influential portrait photographers. From 1957 to 1965 he worked as a window dresser in Barcelona, Toronto and Geneva before moving to New York as a self-taught photographer. Schels returned to Germany in 1970 and opened a studio in Munich. Until the mid-1990s he worked for clients including BMW, Pan Am and Deutsche Post, and for magazines such as Stern, Annabelle, Eltern and ZEITmagazin. Parallel Schels produced independent work; from the mid-1980s his black-and-white portraits gained an increasingly wide audience, particularly his long-term documentary studies and portrait series. Schels’ photography has received numerous awards and has been exhibited internationally