View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
October 28, 2025 – May 3, 2026
Untitled, from the series "Terreno Ocupado", 2014
Cyanotype
Sheet: 22 1/16 × 29 15/16 in. (56 × 76 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation
© Délio Jasse
Oriental Plaza, Beijing, 1998–2002
Inkjet print
Unrolled: 14 9/16 in. × 13 ft. 10 15/16 in. (37 × 424 cm)
Box: 3 3/4 × 17 5/16 × 3 15/16 in. (9.6 × 44 × 10 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation
© Luo Yongjin
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection, a preview of a landmark promised gift of photographs from Artur Walther. Assembled over three decades and across five continents, Walther’s vast collection of over 6,500 photographs and time-based media is regarded as among the finest in the world. The 40 works in View Finding introduce his landmark gift and considers how artists across the globe use the camera to navigate shifting terrain.
“This remarkable promised gift from The Walther Collection marks a watershed moment at The Met,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “View Finding’s carefully curated selection brings iconic works into conversation with new and emerging artistic voices. We are deeply grateful to Artur and his foundation for this gift that profoundly expands our ability to tell a global history of photography.”Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, “At The Met, The Walther Collection will become an essential resource for scholars and museum goers. Introducing its phenomenal range of works, this exhibition situates the camera as a powerful tool for social critique, reflection, and change.”
Awet. Eritrea to London by car, boat, lorry, train
and aeroplane, 2013
Image: 34 7/16 × 24 13/16 in. (87.5 × 63 cm)
Text: 11 × 8 1/8 in. (28 × 20.7 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation
© Aida Silvestri
Untitled, from the series "The Park", 1971
Gelatin silver print
Image: 12 5/16 × 18 3/8 in. (31.2 × 46.7 cm)
Sheet: 15 7/8 × 19 13/16 in. (40.3 × 50.4 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation
© Kohei Yoshiyuki
The modern and contemporary photographs in View Finding highlight photographic practices across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Both inventive and politically urgent, these projects engage the pressing issues of their time. Responding to transformations of the landscape and built environment, they investigate the effects of architecture and spatial planning on identity and social order. In apartheid-era Johannesburg, as in industrializing Shenzen and post-colonial Dakar, they register and reshape environments in flux, looking anew at how we traverse them.
The exhibition introduces many new artists to the Museum and celebrates their Met debut. Works by Santu Mofokeng, François-Xavier Gbré, Luo Yongjin, and others expand and enrich the collection and testify to the dynamic role of the camera in contemporary art making across the globe. Much of their work serves an intermediary role and reflects broader histories of creative work: Delio Jasse reprises the 19th-century cyanotype process to make new views of industrializing Angola, and Aida Silvestri stitches embroidery thread into her prints to chart the perilous migratory paths of Eritrean refugees. In a time-based media presentation, collaborators Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse explore an infamous Johannesburg apartment building as an emblem of apartheid and its aftermath. Artur Walther commissioned their 12-channel slideshow, Windows, Ponte City (2008–11), which appears at The Met in a bespoke installation.
View Finding explores a spectrum of photographic practice, from the formal to the applied. The show features street scenes by Lisette Model and Nobuyoshi Araki, and cool-eyed conceptual projects by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Günther Förg, and Thomas Ruff. The work of these lauded practitioners keeps company with that of emerging artists and endeavors far outside the realm of fine art—among them, views by French and American photographers for hire and NASA dispatches from deep space. Such vernacular materials are a recent focus of The Walther Collection, and their inclusion here testifies to the scope of the medium’s artistic, scientific, and commercial aims.
“When Artur Walther began to acquire photography, he aimed to expand the parameters of the field,” said Virginia McBride, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs. “In turn, View Finding presents international perspectives on hyperlocal subjects. With inventive eyes, the photographers in View Finding study the sidewalks of Nairobi and storefronts of Fifth Avenue. They search public parks from Tokyo to Tangier. In private bedrooms, parking lots, and other places easy to overlook, they focus in, finding—here and there—unlikely sites of self-reflection and social change.”
Winter in Tembisa, 1991
Gelatin silver print
Image: 14 15/16 × 22 13/16 in. (38 × 58 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation
© Santu Mofokeng
Salle des avocats, Palais de Justice, Cap Manuel, Dakar, 2014
Chromogenic print
Image: 39 3/8 × 59 1/16 in. (100 × 150 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation
© François-Xavier Gbré
The Walther Collection Overview
The Walther Collection is principally known for its photographs by 20th-century and contemporary artists from across the African continent. Walther conceived the collection to explore how photographers documented the enormous social change that has unfolded over the last century. Highlights include photographs by Santu Mofokeng and Yto Barrada, whose works are shown in View Finding, along with Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, Zanele Muholi, Lebohang Kganye, and J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere. These and other artists in the collection use the camera to explore shifting roles of identity and interrogate experiences of migration, colonialism, war, and industrialization. The collection holds superb photographs by the most prominent African photographers in South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Congo, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Morocco.
The Walther Collection is equally rich in late 20th-century and contemporary photographs and video from China. These works show the widespread adoption of the camera by successive generations of Chinese artists after the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. The photographers respond to transformative changes not only to the urban landscape but also to social relations and everyday life. Notable examples include works by Luo Yongjin and Weng Fen, whose works are presented in View Finding. Other preeminent practitioners include Ai Weiwei, Hai Bo, and Yang Fudong. The collection also includes a significant group of Japanese photographs, with large holdings of works by Nobuyoshi Araki, whose intimate visual diary of Tokyo appears in the exhibition.
Grain Elevators, 1982–2001
15 gelatin silver prints
22.17 x 18.23 x 1.1 in. (56.3 x 46.3 x 2.8 cm), each
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Promised gift of Artur Walther
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher
Walther first began to build a collection of photographs from his homeland of Germany. A key early acquisition—an outstanding typology by Bernd and Hilla Becher—is featured in View Finding, illustrating a visual framework that would come to shape his subsequent interests. The conceptual legacy of the Bechers runs through the collection and the exhibition.
In 2010, The Walther Collection presented its inaugural exhibition, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, organized by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, at its newly designed museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. Since then, the collection has organized nine major thematic and monographic exhibitions at its museum. Several of these exhibitions traveled widely, including to museums in Europe, Mexico, and West Africa. From 2011 to 2021, the Walther Family Foundation also operated The Walther Collection Project Space in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, introducing photographers from Africa and Asia to American audiences for the first time through solo and thematic exhibitions, public programs, and symposia co-organized with Columbia University and New York University. The collection co-published 20 books with Steidl, all of which have broadened the scholarship about modern and contemporary photography by spotlighting artists who have made a substantial contribution to the history of the medium.
About Artur Walther
Artur Walther began collecting photography in the late 1990s, initially focusing on German modernist photography before expanding to contemporary photography and video. In 2010, he established the Walther Family Foundation. The foundation, which operates a large exhibition space in Neu-Ulm, Germany, presents thematic and monographic exhibitions drawn from the collection’s expansive range of photography and media art, including African, Chinese, Japanese, and European holdings of modern and contemporary works, 19th-century photography from Europe and Africa, and vernacular lens-based artwork from across the globe. Walther is the recipient of the 2016 Trustee Award from the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the 2021 Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh). Born in Neu-Ulm, Germany, he received his MBA from Harvard Business School and was later a partner at Goldman Sachs.
Displays in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and Tang Wing
Select works from the promised gift have been integrated into The Met’s reimagined galleries for the Arts of Africa, part of the redesigned Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Concurrent with View Finding, an inaugural display explores self-portraiture in the work of artists including Seydou Keïta, Zanele Muholi, and Samuel Fosso. In his acclaimed African Spirits series (2008), Fosso pays tribute to heroes of the African diaspora by adopting the personae of Martin Luther King Jr., Tommie Smith, Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Léopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, among others.
Works from The Walther Collection will also be featured in the forthcoming Tang Wing, where they will enrich presentations of modern and contemporary art from around the world. Designed by architect Frida Escobedo, the 126,000-square-foot, five-story wing is set to open in 2030, with more than 70,000 square feet for the presentation of art and approximately 18,500 square feet of outdoor space spread across the fourth- and fifth-floor terraces.
View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection is co-organized by Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge, and Virginia McBride, Assistant Curator, both in the Department of Photographs.
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
The Met Fifth Avenue, New York
Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, Gallery 851
