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 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.
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Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931–2007; 1934–2015) Grain Elevators, 1982–87
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Artwork copyright © 2025 Estate of Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher.
Inspired by the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) photographers August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch, as well as by vernacular photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented vanishing European and American industrial architecture such as blast furnaces, water towers, silos, and the like, organizing them by type. Produced between 1959 and 2007, the year of Bernd’s death, the couple’s grouped images of similar structures initially found a receptive audience among the Minimalist and Conceptual artists of the 1970s. Pieces by Sander and other German modernists, along with the Bechers’ typologies and works by Bernd’s students Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, formed the original nucleus of Walther’s collection.
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Santu Mofokeng (South African, 1956–2020)Winter in Tembisa, 1991
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Artwork copyright © Santu Mofokeng Foundation.
South African photojournalist Santu Mofokeng, who died in 2020 at age 63, began his career in the 1970s as a street photographer before joining Afrapix, an anti-apartheid photographers’ collective, in the 1980s. He is best known, however, for images taken in the ’80s and ’90s of South African township life, such as this haunting picture of a barren, fog-shrouded landscape dominated by a towering advertising sign for detergent. In works like these, Mofokeng, long concerned with photojournalism’s tendency toward simplistic representations, presents a more nuanced view of the South African Black experience.
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Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé (Nigerian, born 1963) Celebrate 1–8, 1994
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Artwork copyright © Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé.
Drawing on the history of African studio photography by such giants as Seydou Keïta, in which sitters enacted their will to self-determination, and perhaps inspired as well by the self-portraiture of contemporaries like Rotimi Fani-Kayode, London-based Nigerian photographer Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé here shows himself as a blurred nude figure moving through a riot of colorful streamers. More lighthearted than Bamgboyé’s other series, the photographs nevertheless address the challenges of cultural displacement, racial othering, and Western stereotyping of Black masculinity for immigrant Africans like himself.
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Aida Silvestri (Eritrean, born 1978) Awet. Eritrea to London by Car, Boat, Lorry, Train, and Aeroplane, from the series “Even This Will Pass,” 2013
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Artwork © Aida Silvestri.
The embroideries on London-based artist Aida Sylvestri’s blurred portraits of Eritrean refugees trace the migrant journeys of each sitter from Eritrea to the United Kingdom. In the artist’s own words, “Only a few reach their final destination after months of struggling to cross different countries. Some end up dying in the Sahara Desert or the Mediterranean Sea. Others are detained in refugee camps or prisons, and many more end up in the hands of human traffickers, where they are abused, tortured or killed unless they provide a ransom.” The title of the series, “Even This Will Pass,” is taken from a message left on a wall on Mount Sinai; in the 2000s and early 2010s, thousands of Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Eritrean refugees crossed from Africa into Israel via the Sinai Desert.
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François-Xavier Gbré (Ivorian, born France, 1978) Salle des Avocats, Palais de Justice, Cap Manuel, Dakar, Senegal, 2014
Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of Artur Walther. Artwork copyright © François-Xavier Gbré.
Precolonial, postcolonial, and present-day Africa collide in interiors and landscapes captured by French-born Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré, who left Europe in 2010 to settle in West Africa. Here, a modernistic courthouse, built shortly before Senegal gained independence from France in 1960, appears as an environment worthy of a Surrealist painter, marked by obvious decay and featuring a central cubistic structure whose exact purpose is unclear. Not shown in the picture is the funding that will shortly transform the building into a venue for art installations and fashion shows, part of Senegal’s initiative to position itself as a gateway to Africa.
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Délio Jasse (Angolan, born 1980) Untitled, from the series “Terreno Occupado,” 2014
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Artwork copyright © Délio Jasse.
Returning to Angola in 2011 after a long, self-imposed exile, Milan-based photographer Délio Jasse documented his hometown of Luanda as if he were an explorer from an earlier age. Reprising the antique process of cyanotype printing (of which there are several vintage examples in this show), he rendered the city, newly recovered from civil war and rebuilt by oil wealth, not in bald black-and-white photographs but in deep blue, soft-focus prints on rag paper, presenting it as unfamiliar territory.
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Luo Yongjin (Chinese, born 1960) New Residence No. 7, Luoyang, 1997
Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of Artur Walther. Artwork copyright © Luo Yongjin.
The 1990s in China saw an explosion of photo-based, video, and performance work, often with political or satiric overtones, by post-Tiananmen artists. Reflecting the country’s economic growth of the time, Luo Yongjin’s view of a brutalist housing block in the old city of Luoyang is one of many he took of new buildings across China. The series was inspired by the work of Thomas Struth, with whom Luo Yongjin exhibited in the 1997 two-person show “Face to Face” in Beijing.
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Kohei Yoshiyuki (Japanese, 1946–2022) Untitled, from the series “The Park,” 1971
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Artwork copyright © Estate of Kohei Yoshiyuki.
In the early 1970s, Tokyo-based photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki discovered that nocturnal sexual encounters taking place in the city’s public parks were being enacted before audiences of avid voyeurs. Between 1971 and 1979, using infrared film and a custom flash, he documented not only the trysts but their observers. Strangely reminiscent of nighttime wildlife photographs, his lens captured seemingly oblivious lovers, often surrounded by zealous lurkers who approach ever closer as if longing to participate. Yoshiyuki showed life-size enlargements of the photographs in 1979 in a darkened gallery, where visitors were given flashlights to examine the images at close hand, thus replicating the photographer’s own experience in shooting them.
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Unknown American maker, Blackfoot, Idaho – SS #1, January 1948
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation. Photo: Eugenia Burnett Tinsley.
Beginning in the 2010s, the Walther Collection expanded its purview to include vernacular photographs—a genre encompassing such utilitarian or amateur images as ID pictures, vacation snapshots, mugshots, and evidence photos—positing that they could reveal much about a society’s cultural, economic, and political structures as well as its internalized values. This page, with three views of a gas station in Idaho, was taken from a record of Texaco’s franchises in the American West. Civic and corporate projects of this kind influenced such artists as Nan Goldin and William Eggleston, as well as the Bechers.
