The Walther Collection

Events of the Social: Portraiture and Collective Agency (2023) is a comprehensive investigation into photographic works by artists from the African continent and its diaspora. Taking the politics of the “colonial gaze” as its starting point, the book looks at the diverse complexity of the nineteenth-century archive through a selection of vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards and album pages. Three generations of African artists from the 1940s till now then chart the changing features of African societies through portraiture, exploring notions of the self, gender, sexuality, race, social status and politics.

Jo Ractliffe: Photographs 1980s – now (2025) is the first book to present a comprehensive selection of the work of South African photographer Jo Ractliffe. Looking back over the past 35 years, it brings together images from major photo-essays, as well as early works that have not been seen before.

Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (2020) brings together 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.

Autoportrait (2020) 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.

SIXSIXSIX (2020) 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.

RongRong's Diary: Beijing East Village (2019) presents an expansive selection of striking photographs, together with first person accounts from his private diary, which RongRong made between 1993 and 1998 within the artistic community known as Beijing East Village.

Life and Dreams (2018) is the first extensive catalogue of works by Chinese artists represented in The Walther Collection. The publication demonstrates the remarkable speed with which photography and media art have occupied important positions within the field of experimental Chinese art since the early 1990s.

Recent Histories (2017) unites the perspectives of fourteen artists of African descent, who investigate social identity, questions of belonging, and an array of sociopolitical concerns.

O Futuro Certo (2015) presents selections from Guy Tillim’s most influential works and series of the last decade.

The Order of Things (2015) explores the production and uses of typological sequences, serial imagery, conceptual portraiture, archival imagery, and time-based performance in photography from the 1880s to the present.

In Faces and Phases (2014), Zanele Muholi embarks on a journey of "visual activism" to ensure black queer and transgender visibility.

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse photographed and documented the residents and spaces of Johannesburg’s iconic apartment building, Ponte City, for more than six years.

Gulu Real Art Studio (2013) features studio portraits collected by the photographer Martina Bacigalupo from the Gulu Real Art Studio in Gulu, Uganda.

The Black Photo Album (2013) presents Santu Mofokeng’s collection of private photographs commissioned by urban black working- and middle-class families in South Africa between 1890-1950.

African Photography from The Walther Collection (2010–2013) investigates African photography and video through the themes of portraiture, landscape, and the historic archive. The three-volume slipcase includes Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, Appropriated Landscapes, and Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive.

Distance and Desire (2013) is the first major catalogue to stage a dialogue between the ethnographic visions of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century African photography and engagements with the archive by contemporary artists.

By examining the effects of war, migration, colonisation, industrialisation and ideology on South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique, Appropriated Landscapes (2011) reveals the varied histories of these regions and their peoples.

Events of the Self (2010) presents the work of three generations of African artists and photographers with that of modern and contemporary German photographers.