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Closed until further notice

In light of the increasing concerns and rapidly changing developments related to Covid-19, The Walther Collection closes its doors to the public – our priority being the safety of our visitors and staff worldwide.

We remain at work on our exciting 2021 program, including an exhibition on Santu Mofokeng and David Golblatt in Neu-Ulm, Germany, and Events of the Social: Portraiture and Collective Agency, an extensive presentation of African photography from our holdings during Photo España at Círculo de Bellas Artes / Sala Picasso in Madrid.

During our closure we released four publications in collaboration with Steidl: two monographs by Samuel Fosso titled SIXSIXSIX and Autoportrait, the catalogue Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography which unites scholarly articles that approach our collection of vernacular photography, and the retrospective book Jo Ractliffe: Photographs 1980s – now on the career of the South African artist Jo Ractliffe, whose work is an important part of our collection.

We continue to support the work of photographic artists and think critically about the histories of the medium.

Find us also here:

On Instagram @walthercollect
On Facebook at www.facebook.com/thewalthercollection
By email in New York at .
By email in Germany at .

We truly want to hear from you.

We wish everyone health, safety, and calm in this challenging period.

Artur Walther
Sophie-Charlotte Opitz
Troy Wong

Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography brings together 20 leading scholars and critics to consider vernacular photography. Defining vernacular photography by its social function rather than by its aesthetic features, the essayists reexamine these ordinary photographs in relation to power and ideology, as well as to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in the communities from which they originated.

Edited by Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis.

Autoportrait is the first comprehensive survey of self-portraits by Samuel Fosso, one of the most significant African photographic artists working today. Since the mid-1970s, Fosso has focused on self-portraiture and performance, envisioning variations of identity in the postcolonial era, reflecting themes in global visual culture, and covering the range of expressive applications of the photographic medium.

Edited by Okwui Enwezor.

SIXSIXSIX is dedicated to an extraordinary series of 666 large-scale Polaroids by Samuel Fosso. Made in his Paris studio between October and November 2015, these portraits further emphasize the particular themes of performance and identity construction epitomized in Fosso’s earlier self-portraits. The impressive size and volume of this book, featuring an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, courses a new trajectory in Fosso’s work: an encounter with the camera that is unmediated, repetitive, unabridged, and effected over space and time.