This thirteenth exhibition in the privées series presents a selection of more than 800 photographs from The Walther Collection.

Over a period of twenty years, Artur Walther (born in Ulm, Germany), has assembled one of the most important private collections of photography in the world, remarkable for its international scope, its quality, and its focus on large series by individual artists. Since 2010, The Walther Collection has been on show to the public in two museum spaces, one in Neu-Ulm and one in New York. For La maison rouge, the curator Simon Njami has conceived an exhibition-cum-fable that offers a broad view of human subjects, based on themes like landscape, portraiture, the city, and alterity, and combining works and photographic practices from different periods and origins that are all linked by a serial approach to the medium.
In the exhibition and its catalogue, German conceptual pioneers (Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher) are presented in dialogue with contemporary photographers from Europe, the United States and, above all, Africa and Asia (including Richard Avedon, Nobuyoshi Araki, Seydou Keïta, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi, and Zhang Huan), but also with images whose unidentified authors were working in ethnographic, scientific, or legal contexts.


Artur Walther was born in Ulm, Germany. He lives and works in New York.
A former investment banker, he opened his collection to the public in 2010 with the inauguration of a four-building museum complex in a residential area of Neu-Ulm / Berlafingen, the town where he was born in southern Germany. He has supported photographic programmes
and grants for the past twenty years. Artur Walther began collecting in the late 1990s: first works by contemporary German photographers – particularly Bernd and Hilla Becher, and August Sander – before opening his collection to photography and video art from around the globe. His is now the largest collection of contemporary Asian and African photography in the world.