The Walther Collection, Private art museum and nonprofit organization in Neu-Ulm, Germany.
The Walther Collection is an art museum in Neu-Ulm dedicated to photography, displaying works across multiple buildings from different eras and cultures. The collection spans from 19th-century European and African photographs to contemporary images created by artists worldwide.
Artur Walther, born in Ulm in 1948, was a Goldman Sachs investment banker in New York until he retired in 1994. The collection began with 1920s New Objectivity photographs by August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt. The Burlafingen exhibition complex opened on 12 June 2010, and the New York Project Space followed on 15 April 2011. In 2025 most of the collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The opening exhibition, Events of the Self (2010), was curated by Okwui Enwezor and set three generations of African photographers alongside modern German photography, from Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé to August Sander and the Bechers. Chris Dercon of Tate Modern named it one of Artforum's ten best exhibitions of 2010. Later shows examined colonial traces in African landscapes and the dialogue between ethnographic archives and contemporary artists.
The Burlafingen site is a compound of four neighbouring buildings; the White Box, Green House and Black House held the galleries, while the grey fourth building served as office, library and guest flat. The White Box has 500 m² of gallery space below ground, partly visible from the ground floor. The site closed after its final exhibition ended in March 2025, so check current access before travelling.
The inaugural 2010 exhibition, Events of the Self, was curated by Okwui Enwezor and set three generations of African photographers alongside modern German photography, from Seydou Keïta to August Sander. Tate Modern director Chris Dercon picked it as one of Artforum's ten best exhibitions of that year.
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