The Walther Collection

We are pleased to present View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This exhibition offers a preview of works from the Collection's landmark gift to The Met and introduces many artists new to the Museum’s holdings, highlighting the depth and breadth of the transformative acquisition.

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 and the Walther Family Foundation that will be on view October 28, 2025–May 3, 2026. Assembled over three decades and across five continents, the Collection's promised gift of over 6,500 photographs and time-based media is regarded as among the finest in the world.

Click here to read the full press release.

“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.”

The modern and contemporary photographs in View Finding are as diverse as the collection from which they are drawn; they reflect varied practices across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Inventive and politically urgent, these projects engage the pressing issues of their times. 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. Mixing media and incorporating a variety of photographic techniques, the works in the show reflect broader histories of creative work: Délio Jasse reprises the 19th-century cyanotype process to make new views of industrializing Angola.

Aida Silvestri stitches embroidery thread into her prints to chart the perilous migratory paths of Eritrean refugees. Her work is motivated by social concern, but it also explores the camera’s ability to connect people to a place. In these portraits of immigrant women, the artist strategically blurs her subjects' faces. This gesture, born of a need for protective anonymity, seems to evoke a greater enigma of the self. Silvestri regards her series as a documentary project dedicated to those travelers who never reached their destination.

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.”

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.”

Following this focused presentation, The Met will mount a comprehensive show of the 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 is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel.