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| Established | June 2010 |
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| Location | Reichenauerstrasse 21 Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany |
| Website | walthercollection.com |
The Walther Collection is a private non-profit organization dedicated to researching, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing modern and contemporary photography and video art. The collection has two exhibition spaces: the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, in Germany, and the Walther Collection Project Space in New York City.
Established by German-American art collector Artur Walther, the Walther Collection opened in June 2010 in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany. [1] The Walther Collection Project Space opened in New York City in April 2011. [2] The Walther Collection incorporates works across regions, periods, and artistic sensibilities, particularly those by artists and photographers working in Asia and Africa.
The Walther Collection's main exhibition venue is a four-building museum compound in Neu Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany. The principal buildings – the White Box, Green House, and Black House – provide gallery space for the annual exhibition program. A fourth building on the campus accommodates administrative offices and a library. Designed by the Ulm-based architectural firm Braunger Wörtz, [3] the White Box is a light-filled, three-story minimalist structure that houses the Walther Collection's main galleries, and hosts thematic exhibitions and commissioned projects. The Green House, a former residential home, is used for small-format works. The Black House, a bungalow-style structure, presents serial, performance, and conceptual-style photography. [4]
The Walther Collection's inaugural exhibition, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, opened in June 2010. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition integrated the work of three generations of African artists and photographers with selections of modern and contemporary German photography. Events of the Self featured works by Sammy Baloji, Yto Barrada, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candice Breitz, Allan deSouza, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Samuel Fosso, David Goldblatt, Romuald Hazoumé, Pieter Hugo, Seydou Keïta, Santu Mofokeng, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Zanele Muholi, Ingrid Mwangi, Jo Ratcliffe, August Sander, Berni Searle, Malick Sidibé, Mikhael Subotzky, and Guy Tillim. Chris Dercon, director of Tate Modern, chose Events of the Self as one of the 10 best exhibitions of 2010 for Artforum magazine. [5] Highlights from Events of the Self appeared in Paris Photo 2011. [6]
The second annual exhibition of the Walther Collection, Appropriated Landscapes, opened on June 16, 2011. [7] Curated by Corinne Diserens, Appropriated Landscapes brought together photography and video exploring the effects of war, migration, energy, architecture, and memory on the landscapes of Southern Africa, featuring works by Mitch Epstein, David Goldblatt, Zanele Muholi, Jo Ratcliffe, Penny Siopis, Patrick Waterhouse, Mikhael Subotzky and Guy Tillim. [8]
The third exhibition of the Walther Collection's multi-year investigation of African photography, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, opened on June 8, 2013. Distance and Desire, curated by Tamar Garb, was the first major exhibition to address the dialogue between ethnographic visions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century African photography and engagements with the archive by contemporary African artists. [9] The exhibition included portraits, figure studies, cartes de visite, postcards, books, and album pages from southern and eastern Africa, featuring images made from the 1860s to 1940s by A. M. Duggan-Cronin and numerous unidentified and unknown photographers. The historical works were presented together with photography, video, and archive projects by contemporary artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Santu Mofokeng, Sue Williamson, Sammy Baloji, Guy Tillim, David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Zanele Muholi, and Jo Ratcliffe. Distance and Desire was the culmination of this three-part exhibition series in 2011 and 2012 at the Walther Collection Project Space [10] and the international symposium Encounters with the African Archive, which took place in November 2012 at New York University. [11]
In May 2015, The Walther Collection opened The Order of Things: Photography from The Walther Collection. The exhibition, organized by Brian Wallis, examined how the formal tools of classification, particularly archives, typologies, and time-based series, have opened critical challenges to the synthetic conventions of photographic realism. (A previous version was presented at Les Rencontres d'Arles in Arles, France, from July–September 2014.) The Order of Things included photographs and installations by Karl Blossfeldt, Bernd and Hilla Becher, J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, August Sander, Richard Avedon, Stephen Shore, Samuel Fosso, Guy Tillim, Zanele Muholi, Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Song Dong, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Ed Ruscha, Dieter Appelt, Eadweard Muybridge, Kohei Yoshiyuki, and Nobuyoshi Araki. [12]
The Walther Collection Project Space, in the West Chelsea Arts Building in New York City, extends the collection's mission and program to American audiences.
The space opened to the public on April 15, 2011 with an exhibition of Jo Ratcliffe's portfolio of platinum prints from the series As Terras do Fim do Mundo (The Lands of the End of the World). [13] [14]
The second exhibition at the Project Space was August Sander and Seydou Keïta: Portraiture and Social Identity, [15]
It exhibited Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Nothing to Lose, the first solo exhibition in New York of Fani-Kayode's photographs. [16]
The Walther Collection presented the three-part exhibition series Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive [17] at the Project Space New York from September 2012 to May 2013. [18] [19]
Gulu Real Art Studio, an exhibition of ID photographs collected in Uganda by Martina Bacigalupo, was presented from September 2013 to February 2014. [20]
Christine Meisner's Disquieting Nature, a video installation exploring the geographies in the Mississippi Delta region where blues music originates, was presented from February 28 to June 14, 2014. [21]
A mid-career survey of self-portraiture by Samuel Fosso was exhibited from September 11, 2014 to January 17, 2015. The collection presented Santu Mofokeng: A Metaphorical Biography from January 29 to June 27, 2015. [22]
Tina Barney is an American photographer best known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England. She is a member of the Lehman family.
David Goldblatt HonFRPS was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the apartheid period. After apartheid's end, he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. Goldblatt's body of work was distinct from that of other anti-apartheid artists in that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack; Goldblatt said, "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments.... This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." Goldblatt also wrote journal articles and books on aesthetics, architecture, and structural analysis.
Seydou Keïta was a Malian photographer known for his portraits of people and families he took at his portrait photography studio in Mali's capital, Bamako, in the 1950s. His photographs are widely acknowledged not only as a record of Malian society but also as pieces of art.
Guy Bourdin, was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his highly stylized and provocative images. From 1955, Bourdin worked mostly with Vogue as well as other publications including Harper's Bazaar. He shot ad campaigns for Chanel, Charles Jourdan, Pentax and Bloomingdale's.
Malick Sidibé was a Malian photographer from a Fulani (Fula) village in Soloba, who was noted for his black-and-white studies of popular culture in the 1960s in Bamako, Mali. Sidibé had a long and fruitful career as a photographer in Bamako, and was a well-known figure in his community. In 1994 he had his first exhibition outside of Mali and received much critical praise for his carefully composed portraits. Sidibé's work has since become well known and renowned on a global scale. His work was the subject of a number of publications and exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. In 2007, he received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, becoming both the first photographer and the first African so recognized. Other awards he has received include a Hasselblad Award for photography in 2003, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2008), and a World Press Photo award (2010).
Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".
Mitchell Epstein is an American photographer. His books include Vietnam: A Book of Changes (1997); Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award; Recreation: American Photographs 1973–1988 (2005); Mitch Epstein: Work (2006); American Power (2009); Berlin (2011); New York Arbor (2013); Rocks and Clouds (2018); Sunshine Hotel (2019); In India (2021); and Property Rights (2021).
Bob Gosani (1934–1972) was a South African photographer.
Guy Tillim is a South African photographer known for his work focusing on troubled regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. A member of the country's white minority, Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1983, and he also spent time at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. His photographs and projects have been exhibited internationally and form the basis of several of Tillim's published books.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is awarded annually by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Photographers' Gallery to a photographer who has made the most significant contribution to the photographic medium in Europe during the past year.
Fazal Sheikh is an artist who uses photographs to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, born Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode, was a Nigerian photographer who at the age of 11 moved with his family to England, fleeing from the Biafran War. A seminal figure in British contemporary art, Fani-Kayode explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions. He created the bulk of his work between 1982 and 1989, the year he died from AIDS-related complications.
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black Lesbian, Gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
Pieter Hugo is a South African photographer who primarily works in portraiture. He lives in Cape Town.
Artur Walther is a German-American art collector focused on exhibiting and publishing contemporary photography and video art. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Walther was a General Partner at Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 1994. He began collecting photography in the late 1990s and later established The Walther Collection, which is open to the public at its museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany and its Project Space in New York City.
Santu Mofokeng was a South African news and documentary photographer who worked under the alias Mofokengâ. Mofokeng was a member of the Afrapix collective and won a Prince Claus Award.
Graeme Williams is a South African photographer known for both his photojournalism during the transition to democracy in South Africa and his documentary projects post-apartheid.
Photography in South Africa has a lively culture, with many accomplished and world-renowned practitioners. Since photography was first introduced to the Cape Colony through the colonising powers, photography has variously been used as a weapon of colonial control, a legitimating device for the apartheid regime, and, in its latest incarnation, a mechanism for the creation of a new South African identity in the age of democracy, freedom and equality.
Jo Ractliffe is a South African photographer and teacher working in both Cape Town, where she was born, and Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the oldest of six sisters born to artist Barbara Fairhead and business leader Jeremy Ractliffe.
Sabelo Mlangeni is a South African photographer living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walther Collection.
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