Early Career
After attending Houghton College, where he studied history with plans to be a lawyer, Sheffer returned to his hometown of Youngsville, Pennsylvania to teach high school history. He often lectured against war in his class room as World War II escalated. Working for the college year book at Houghton College exposed him to photography and lead him to leave teaching to work as a photographer for a department store in Pittsburgh. He later answered a newspaper ad for a photographer in Wisconsin because he admired the work of Wisconsin architect Frank Lloyd Wright and respected that Capital punishment in Wisconsin was abolished in 1853. He moved to Milwaukee in 1945 without "knowing a soul" to work for the prominent society portraitist John Platz. Inspired by the artistic achievements of Yousuf Karsh, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Emily Dickinson, Sheffer approached portraiture in a poetic and artistic manner working to get close in order to isolate the subject. Using a handheld 35 mm camera, natural side lighting and dramatic darkroom techniques, the portraits he generated out of his own Jefferson Street studio were known as having the "Sheffer look". His portraits of Milwaukee's mid-century social elite, artists and architecture earned him the title "Photographer of Photographers" from the Wisconsin Professional Photographers Association in 1955. His clients included actor Jimmy Stewart, comedienne Tallulah Bankhead, and politician Joseph McCarthy who he photographed for Life (magazine). He created the "Portraits of Men" series in the mid-1950s for DuPont, a manufacturer of photographic film and paper, which was destroyed in a fire at his studio. He was president of the Milwaukee Photo Pictorialists and the "Darlot Club" which he once described as the "self-appointed ten best photographers in Wisconsin." The groups favored pictorial style soft focus lenses, and deep shadows in prints. He photographed theater productions extensively for Marquette University from 1955-1968 where many of his works are preserved in a photographic archive. Several of his portraits are also held in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Sheffer photographed Victorian building facades and architectural fragments for the Heritage Milwaukee: The Esthetics of the City exhibition organized by and exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Center April 2-May 10, 1964. Director Tracy Atkinson wrote of Sheffer, "A city is fortunate to have a chronicler with so perceptive an eye. A long-time Milwaukee resident, Sheffer is among that small group of people in love with the face of the city, and he is, in addition, an artist acutely sensitive to its many moods and its slightest changes of expression."
Among his most notable students at the Layton School of Art, where he taught from 1952–1970, was photographer/film maker Larry Clark who often named Sheffer as an early artistic influence and once described him as "the society photographer in town, but he was very hip."
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Walter Sheffer, 1993
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