Selections from the Walter Collection”

Inspired by Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) photographers August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch as well as vernacular photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented disappearing European and American industrial buildings such as blast furnaces, water towers, silos, etc., organizing them by type. The couple’s similarly structured assemblages of images, created between 1959 and 2007 (the year of Bernd’s death), initially found a receptive audience among the minimalist and conceptual artists of the 1970s. Works by Sander and other German modernists, as well as Becher’s typology and works by Bernd’s students Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, formed the original core of Walter’s collection.

South African photojournalist Santu Mofokeng passed away in 2020 at the age of 63. He died in 2020 at the age of 63. He began his career as a street photographer in 2020 before joining the anti-apartheid photographer group Afrapix in the 1980s. However, he is best known for his photographs of small-town life in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, such as this haunting shot of a barren, fog-shrouded landscape topped by a towering detergent billboard. In these works, Mofokeng has long been concerned with the tendency of photojournalism to be simplistic and presents a more nuanced view of the black experience in South Africa.

Drawing on the history of African studio photography by masters such as Seydou Keïta, in which subjects demonstrated a will for self-determination, and perhaps inspired by the self-portraits of contemporaries such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, London-based Nigerian photographer Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé depicts herself in this work as an ambiguous nude figure moving among colorful ribbons. The photographs are more lighthearted than Bamgboyé’s other series, but still address cultural displacement, racial difference, and Western stereotypes of black masculinity for African immigrants like himself.

Kenyan photographer Mimi Cherono Ng’ok documents moments from her travels in Africa and around the world in her series “Another Country.” Although the titles of the series of interiors, landscapes and people photos offer few clues as to where or who they were taken from, the photo shows a woman lying on a blanket with her arms covering her eyes, one of Cherono Ng’ok’s sisters. At the time of her first U.S. solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, she told Antawan Byrd, associate curator at the Art Institute, “these photos read almost like pages from a diary—a record of myself. I always find that I feel good about myself who made them, and because of those photos, that version of me still exists.”

The embroidery on London-based artist Aida Sylvestri’s ambiguous portraits of Eritrean refugees traces each artist’s migrant journey from Eritrea to Britain. In the artist’s own words, “Only a few make it to their final destination after months of arduous travel across different countries. Some end up dying in the Sahara Desert or the Mediterranean. Others are detained in refugee camps or prisons, and many more end up in the hands of human traffickers, where they are abused, tortured or killed unless a ransom is provided.” The series is titled “Even This Will” Pass” is taken from a message left on the Sinai Mount; thousands of Sudanese, Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees entered Israel from Africa through the Sinai Desert in the 2000s and early 2010s.

French-born Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré, who left Europe to settle in West Africa in 2010, captures interiors and landscapes that collide pre-colonial, post-colonial and present-day Africa. Here, a modernist courthouse built in 1960 shortly before Senegal gained independence from France, it looks like a setting worthy of a Surrealist painter, characterized by visible decay and featuring a central three-dimensional structure whose exact purpose is unclear. Funding, not shown in the image, will soon transform the building into a venue for art installations and fashion shows as part of Senegal’s move to position itself as the gateway to Africa.

Milan-based photographer Délio Jasse returned to Angola in 2011 after a long self-imposed exile, documenting his hometown of Luanda in the style of a young explorer. He reinterprets the ancient cyanotype process (there are several classic examples in this exhibition), depicting the city, which had just recovered from the civil war and was rebuilt through oil wealth, not as stark black-and-white photographs but as deep blue soft-focus prints on rag paper, presenting it as unfamiliar territory.

The 1990s saw a proliferation of works by post-Tiananmen artists based on photography, video, and performance, often with political or satirical undertones. Luo Yongjin’s vision of the brutalist residential areas in Luoyang’s old town reflected the country’s economic growth at the time, and was one of his views on new buildings across China. The series was inspired by the work of Thomas Struth, with whom Luo Yongjin exhibited in 1997 in the two-person exhibition “Face to Face” in Beijing.

In the early 1970s, Tokyo photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki discovered that nocturnal sex acts were taking place in city parks in front of an audience of eager voyeurs. Between 1971 and 1979, he used infrared film and custom-made flashes to document not only the trysts but also the observers. His shots are strangely reminiscent of nocturnal wildlife photographs, capturing seemingly oblivious lovers, often surrounded by eager lurkers who draw ever closer as if eager to take part in the action. In 1979, Yoshiyuki displayed life-size enlargements of these photographs in a darkened gallery, where visitors could use a flashlight to view the images up close, replicating the photographer’s own experience of taking them.

Beginning in the 2010s, the Walter Collection expanded its scope to include vernacular photographs—a genre that includes utilitarian or amateur images such as ID photos, vacation snapshots, mugshots, and evidence photos—on the belief that they can reveal a society’s cultural, economic, and political structure and its intrinsic values. This page contains three views of Idaho gas stations, taken from Texaco’s franchise records in the western United States. Such civic and corporate projects influenced artists such as Nan Goldin and William Eggleston, as well as the Bechers.