View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection

The world looks different through a camera’s viewfinder—like a picture frame or a windowpane, it redirects the eye. In modern and contemporary photographs from an esteemed private collection, artists use the camera to navigate shifting terrain. Registering and reshaping environments in flux, they look anew at how we traverse them.

When Artur Walther began to acquire photography, he aimed to expand the parameters of the field. Assembled over three decades and across five continents, his vast collection brings together a diverse group of makers—some celebrated and others still unknown. View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection introduces his landmark gift of over 6,500 works and highlights the collection’s pioneering point of view. Presenting international perspectives on hyperlocal subjects, it showcases the camera as a tool for creativity and critique. 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.