NEW YORK, NY.- 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 that will be on view October 28, 2025–May 3, 2026. Assembled over three decades and from 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. Featuring over 40 works, View Finding introduces 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.”

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.”

Gift 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.

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.