INTO THE UNSEEN
THE WALTHER COLLECTION

THE WALTHER COLLECTION is considered one of the world’s most renowned collections of global photography. INTO THE UNSEEN marks the final major presentation of the collection in Europe before 6,500 works are gifted to THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART in New York. The exhibition unfolds a poetics of the unseen through artistic works and vernacular photographs that focus on spirituality, trauma, transformation, and multisensory perception.

Featuring works by, among others, Cang Xin, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Santu Mofokeng, Eadweard Muybridge, Jo Ractliffe, RongRong, Berni Searle, and Yang Fudong, as well as a new sound work by photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán and a new photo installation by artist and forensic scientist Ana María Gómez López.

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.