Last May the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced that photography collector Artur Walther, via his Walther Family Foundation, had made a promised gift to the museum of more than 6,500 works. Now, as a foretaste of a larger exhibition to come in 2028, 40 pieces from the promised gift are on view in the show “View Finding: Selections from the Walther Collection.”
Walther, who has been collecting photographs and time-based media for 30 years, is best known for the breadth of his holdings in African photography, which range from post-WWII and apartheid-era studio photographs by Seydou Keïta and S. J. Moodley, respectively, to contemporary works by the likes of Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi, and Guy Tillim.
But these holdings also encompass German modernist photography by August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt; typologies by Bernd and Hilla Becher and works by their students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; post–Tiananmen Square Chinese conceptual and video art of the late 20th century; extended series by contemporary Japanese photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, and Kohei Yoshiyuki; and examples of vernacular photography, including commercial, forensic, and ethnographic images, from the 1800s to the present.
A guiding principle behind the collection is the evolution of the photographic medium, since its invention and around the globe, as an indicator of—and force for—social and political change in the modern era. It favors photographic series, with works ranging from motion studies by pioneering 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge to staged self-portraits by Cameroonian Nigerian artist Samuel Fosso, and from Richard Avedon’s 1970s depictions of American politicians to a set of photographs of nameless inmates of a psychiatric hospital from 1920.
Below are nine representative works in the Met’s new exhibition.
