The Walther Collection

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The Walther Collection

The Walther Collection is dedicated to researching, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing modern an We ask for your understanding.

The Walther Collection Project Space
526 West 26th Street, Suite 718
New York, NY 10001
United States

The Project Space is closed from November 23–24 for Thanksgiving. The last day of "East of Que Village: The Ends of Nature" is on Saturday, November 25.

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The Walther Collection
Reichenauerstrasse 21
Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen
Germany

Our exhibition premises in Neu-Ulm are closed from November 13, 2

017 to May 13, 2018 due to renovations. On May 13, 2018 we will open the exhibition Life and Dreams: Photography & Media Art in China since the 1990s with an open house day from 11am to 5pm.

For information, tour guide bookings or questions, please contact [email protected] or +49 731 176 91 43.

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The Walther Collection opened in June 2010 in Neu-Ulm / Burlafingen, Germany. The Foundation’s New York City outpost, The Walther Collection Project Space, opened in April 2011. The Collection incorporates works across regions, periods, and artistic sensibilities, giving particular focus to artists and photographers working in Asia and Africa.

05/01/2026

“View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art closes this Sunday, May 3, 2026.

02/20/2026

In a new profile in the Financial Times, Artur Walther reflects on his major gift of global photography to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and his new focus on architecture and nature.

“The time is now,” Artur says of gifting 6,500 photographs, albums, and works of time-based media, a collection shaped by a commitment to what “had not been looked at, written about or researched.” From early engagements with Chinese contemporary art to a sustained focus on African and vernacular photography, Artur sought to expand the canon and reframe histories of the medium.

After a career on Wall Street that he describes as “very intense, but one dimensional,” collecting photography allowed a new way of seeing — through research, dialogue, and long-term commitment to artists and their bodies of work rather than single images.

Speaking from his home in upstate New York, Artur reflects on a renewed closeness to the land that can be traced back to his childhood in Southern Germany: “With age, I connect more with nature…There is beauty in dead leaves, even their sound… We need to focus on what is real: the cycles in nature and the self.”

Interview and text by Andrew Jack for , images by

Read the full profile via the link in bio.

Artworks: Karl Blossfeldt, “Urformen der Kunst,” 1928; Otl Aicher, “Strukturfotografie: Bäume, Felder, Gräser,” 1950s–60s; Martin Wenzel, “Use the spoon,” 2013, Franz West, “Untitled,” 1993/4, Imi Knoebel, “Little Piet (Objekt Blau, Rot, Gleb, Weiß),” 1993

Landscape NewYork

01/08/2026

We’re delighted to share a recent exhibition review in The Wall Street Journal of “View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection,” now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through May 3, 2026.

“View Finding” brings together 40 works that examine how photography frames our understanding of the built and lived environment. The artists in this exhibition survey shifting terrain: they show rising cities and crumbling apartments, crosstown traffic and transcontinental migration, and people responding to such transformations in real time. These photographs—from industrial typologies and vernacular imagery to conceptual, documentary, and experimental approaches—register and reshape environments in flux, looking anew at how we traverse them.

“‘View Finding’ is not an indiscriminate hodgepodge,” writes William Meyers in his review, “but a small demonstration of proliferating photographic techniques, the applications to which they can be put, and The Walther Collection’s engagement with this efflorescence.”

Characterized as an “appetizer,” “View Finding” introduces the landmark gift of more than 6,500 works from Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation. Following this exhibition, The Met will mount a comprehensive show of The Walther Collection in 2028. Works from the promised gift are also now on view in the Arts of Africa galleries and will appear in the new Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art, opening in 2030.

The exhibition features works by artists including Nobuyoshi Araki, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Délio Jasse (), Lisette Model, Santu Mofokeng, James Muriuki (), Thomas Ruff (), Aida Silvestri (), and Kohei Yoshiyuki, among others, presenting international angles on hyperlocal subjects that showcases the camera as a tool for creativity and critique. “View Finding” is co-organized by Jeff Rosenheim and Virginia McBride.

Link in bio to read the full review by William Meyers.

11/03/2025

“I deeply thank Max Hollein for welcoming The Walther Collection into The Met family. It is a great honor to have the exhibition ‘View Findings’ in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, and to also see other works from the Collection currently on display throughout The Met, including Seydou Keïta and Zanele Muholi in the new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, and Samuel Fosso in front of the Modern and Contemporary Galleries. I look forward to the comprehensive exhibition of the Collection planned for 2028. This promised gift will expand the museum’s ability to tell a global history of photography, one that reflects the diversity, complexity, and artistry of the medium across centuries and continents.

“I offer my deepest gratitude to Max for his vision for The Met and for pursuing this partnership. I thank Jeff Rosenheim and Virginia McBride in the Department of Photographs for their dedication in conceptualizing and exhibiting ‘View Findings’ and for their efforts in researching the vast Collection and selecting 6,500 photographs, albums, and works of time-based media, featuring modern and contemporary art from Africa, China, Japan, and Germany, among other places. I also thank Alisa LaGamma for her leadership in curating the new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which thoughtfully integrates a series of portraits from the Collection through evolving rotations.

“The mission of The Walther Collection, since its inception thirty years ago, has been to break away from traditional photographic frameworks. The goal of the Collection has been to encourage an active collaboration on a global basis between artists, curators, writers, scholars, students, and general audiences as partners, to encourage dialogue and to generate new ideas. The Collection has served as a space for critical thinking about visual culture: an exhibition space, a publishing house, an archive, a library, a laboratory—a space for innovation and experimentation. In gifting the Collection to The Met, I hope to encourage that spirit to continue, and for the artworks to be accessible to vast new audiences and generations to come.” —Artur Walther

Images:

10/28/2025

Opening today at The Met, “View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection” highlights the transformative ways modern and contemporary artists use photography to navigate landscapes— both physical and social.

Drawn from a landmark gift of more than 6,500 works assembled over three decades and across five continents, the exhibition brings together celebrated and emerging photographers who look closely at the overlooked: sidewalks in Nairobi, storefronts on Fifth Avenue, parks from Tokyo to Tangier, and intimate interiors across the globe.

Through inventive framing and perspective, these artists consider how we move through the world— and how the world looks back.

On view through May 3, 2026. Learn more at the link in bio.

📸: Jeff Rosenheim

Banner image: Luo Yongjin (Chinese, born 1960), “Oriental Plaza, Beijing,” 1998-2002 (detail). Inkjet print. Unrolled: 14 9/16 in. x 13 ft. 10 15/16 in. (37 x 424 cm). Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. © Luo Yongjin.

10/25/2025

This past Thursday, we celebrated the opening of our exhibition “Into the Unseen” at Deichtorhallen Hamburg in Germany, where it will be on view until April 26, 2026. This exhibition will be the final major presentation of The Walther Collection in Europe before the majority of the works find a new home at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Showcasing work that activates the multiple sensory registers of photography, “Into the Unseen” invites us to embrace the audible, tactile, and affective registers of photography by exploring what it would mean to understand photography as a medium that stimulates the full array of our senses – from the haptic (touch) to the sonic (sound) to the olfactory (smell) and the gustatory (taste)? Instead of understanding photography as a tool of categorization, a modality for capturing the real or the true, the works shown in this exhibition trouble the lines between the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and the corporeal, the silent and the audible, the remembered, the imagined and the repressed.

“Into the Unseen” features works by, among others, Cang Xin, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Santu Mofokeng, Eadweard Muybridge, Dawit L. Petros, Jo Ractliffe, RongRong, Berni Searle, and Yang Fudong, as well as a new sound work by photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán and a new photo installation by artist Ana María Gómez López.

“Into the Unseen” is curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Curator of the House of Photography, and Prof. Tina M. Campt, Historian and Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. We thank The Metropolitan Museum of Art for their cooperation with this exhibition.

Image: .rogge and

05/14/2025

The Walther Collection is pleased to share that The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced today a major promised gift from Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation. This transformative contribution marks an exciting milestone for The Walther Collection and represents the Foundation’s ongoing commitment to encourage an active collaboration between artists, curators, scholars, and general audiences.

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“The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today a major promised gift from Artur Walther, who has assembled one of the most distinguished private collections of photography in the world, and from the Walther Family Foundation, an art foundation dedicated to the critical understanding of historical and contemporary photography. Comprised of some 6,500 photographs, albums, and works of time-based media, the promised gift features modern and contemporary art from Africa, China, Japan, and Germany, among other places. Also included are 19th- and 20th-century vernacular photographs from the United States, Europe, Colombia, and Mexico. Selections from the collection will be prominently featured in several upcoming museum presentations. In the first of these, photographs by such renowned African artists as Seydou Keïta and Samuel Fosso will accompany the inauguration of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing when it reopens in May 2025. A focused exhibition of international selections from the promised gift will then be presented in fall 2025, followed by a comprehensive show of the collection in 2028. Photographs and time-based media will also be incorporated into future displays in the Tang Wing, The Met’s new galleries for modern and contemporary art set to open in 2030.”

To read the full press release, visit www.walthercollection.com.

.fosso

11/19/2024

The Walther Collection is pleased to invite you to this year´s last Open House for the exhibition “Who We Are: Portraits and Vernacular Photography“ at the Museum Campus in Neu-Ulm. Following the Open House, we will enter a winter break, but the exhibition will remain accessible by appointment.

“Who We Are“ is dedicated to vernacular photography, the broad category of everyday images that shape and define our lives and that one might see on a passport, in an old family photo album, in a magazine, or even online. The exhibition aims to examine vernacular photography with the same critical attention generally devoted to contemporary fine-art photography, and to consider these familiar but often overlooked photographic practices within specific social and cultural histories.

The installations are displayed in various buildings throughout The Walther Collection’s Museum Campus. While not comprehensive, these focused case studies offer new ways of seeing familiar images and original perspectives on everyday visual culture.

Image 1-4: Installationsansicht © Matthias Schmiedel
Image 5: Unidentified Photgraphers, “Female Wrestling“, 1970s
Image 6: Unidentified Photgraphers, “New Years Eve Party Album“, 1952 - 1958
Image 7-9: Installationsansicht © Matthias Schmiedel
Image 10: Singarum Jeevaruthnam “Kitty” Moodley, “Portraits from Kitty’s Studio“, ca. 1975. © The S. J. Moodley Family. Courtesy The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm / New York.

10/02/2024

The Walther Collection hosted a class last week from „Nearest Truth,“ a podcast on photography, at our Museum Campus in Neu-Ulm led by Brad Feuerhelm, Federico Clavarino, and Chiara Bardelli Nonnino Federico. This year long course focuses on the editing and sequencing of participants‘ photographic works to construct a conceptual presentation in the form of a photobook. Feuerhelm has drawn inspiration from our exhibition „Who We Are: Portraits and Vernacular Photography,“ which has been pivotal in shaping the creative direction of the course.

„Who We Are: Portraits and Vernacular
Photography“ is currently on view at our Museum Campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany.

Opening Hours:
Thursday to Sunday, 2 - 5pm
Free admission, no wheelchair accessibility.

Address

526 W 26th Street, Ste 718
New York, NY
10001

Website

http://www.walthercollection.com/

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