For nearly seven decades Walter Schels’ work has straddled the lines between documentation and transformation, between formal rigor and an experimental spirit. Schels is best known as an empathetic portraitist who explores the essence of his subjects in a minimalistic visual language. Whether young or old, elephant or wilted flower—at the heart of his portraits and long-term studies lie existential themes such as identity, birth and death. His experimental work, however, has been comparatively overlooked: through overpainting, double-exposure, collage and polarization he has increasingly moved into the realm of painting. Schels views the medium as a changeable, open-ended process: “An image is never finished.” This book brings together both halves of his œuvre for the first time—his acclaimed portraits alongside reshaped cityscapes of 1960s New York and recent abstractions using photographic chemicals and plant fragments. The title is poetic self-reflection: on the day of Schels’ birth in 1960, the sun was in Pisces at precisely 16 degrees.