INTO THE UNSEEN
THE WALTHER COLLECTION

As one of the world’s most renowned collections of global photography, The Walther Collection - which was recently gifted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art - encompasses more than 6,500 works spanning multiple genres and geographies, and is distinguished by its unique holdings from Africa, China and Japan.

INTO THE UNSEEN explores themes of spirituality, trauma, transformation and movement in the work of celebrated photographers and artists such as Yang Fudong, Santu Mofokeng, Eadweard Muybridge, Jo Ractliffe, Berni Searle, Cang Xin, Rong Rong, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Em'kal Eyongakpa. Drawing on this wide-ranging collection and organized in four multisensorial chapters the exhibition presents contemporary artworks, historical and vernacular photographs that challenge us to ‘look’ beyond what we see.

Showcasing work that activates the multiple sensory registers of photography, INTO THE UNSEEN invites us to embrace the audible, tactile, and affective registers of photography by exploring what it would mean to understand photography as a medium that stimulates the full array of our senses – from the haptic (touch) to the sonic (sound) to the olfactory (smell) and the gustatory (taste)? Instead of understanding photography as a tool of categorization, a modality for capturing the real or the true, the works shown in this exhibition trouble the lines between the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and the corporeal, the silent and the audible, the remembered, the imagined and the repressed.

Developed in dialogue with Artur Walther, the exhibit is curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Curator of the House of Photography and Prof. Tina M. Campt, Historian and Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. We thank The Metropolitan Museum of Art for their cooperation with this exhibition.