Franz Walderdorff
Franz Walderdorff, considers himself an artist who uses photography. His works suggest watercolor—more like products of pigment and wash. They are abstracted visions of the natural world and the everyday: sun, sand, sea, and bathers on the beach. Walderdorff’s photographs often make us wonder what we are looking at: what scale, what location? Where we see sky or sand he sees continuously changing color and movement.
Walderdorff was born in Munich, Germany in 1961 and studied photography at the Lazi school in Stuttgart. After graduating, he moved to Hamburg to work with the photographer Werner Bokelberg, from whom he learned advertising, portrait and beauty photography. In 1986 Walderdorff moved to New York City. After several years of working with photographers like Bruce Weber and Denis Piel, he was picked up by the legendary Carrie Donovan and started shooting for the New York Times Magazine.
Walderdorff’s work has been widely published in Allure, Spanish and Chinese Vogue, Italian, British and German Glamour, among other magazines. He was on contract with Allure for 22 years. He has widely exhibited his pictures in North America as well as Europe. In 2010, Walderdorff moved to Southampton, New York with his wife and two daughters. He dedicates most of his time now to creating art photography and shooting portraits.
“My primary subject is beauty. I spend long hours on the beach observing, watching and studying. I see the ocean and sky as continuously changing colors and movement, set into a rhythm of geometric forms, and the people on the beach not as people but as ever evolving shapes. To me, the world is one big canvas and the camera is my instrument to transform the visual into a photographic painting of ever-shifting color and light. My images are never planned, capturing rather a distinct moment in time that is impossible to reconstruct.” - FW
