The Walther Collection' is one of the most prominent international collections of African photography. This three-volume work represents the culmination of the collection's multi-year exhibition and publishing program, investigating African photography and video through the themes of portraiture, landscape, and the historic archive. 3 Vols. in slipcase: Vol. I: Events of the self : portraiture and social identity. Vol. II: Appropriated landscapes. Vol. III: Distance and desire : encounters with the African archive.

The Walther Collection is one of the most prominent international collections of African photography. This three-volume work represents the culmination of the collection's multi-year exhibition and publishing program, investigating African photography and video through the themes of portraiture, landscape, and the historic archive. Housed in a handsome slipcase, the individual volumes have been edited by Okwui Enwezor, Corinne Diserens and Tamar Garb.

Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art from The Walther Collection unites the perspectives of 14 contemporary artists of African descent, who investigate social identity, questions of belonging, and an array of sociopolitical concerns--including migration, lineage, the legacies of colonialism and Calvinism, and local custom--as well as personal experiences in Africa and the African diaspora. By highlighting specific creative approaches and studying the sites and collective platforms that enable these practices, this book examines the critical mass that has gathered across generations of African image-makers and lens-based artists. In accentuating different perspectives within this generation and considering the infrastructures that often link them, Recent Histories provides a point of entry to engage critically with current practices, and opens up considerations about how to conceptualize the frameworks of contemporary African photography and video art. The Walther Collection is pleased to present Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art, its fourth exhibition and publication dedicated to African photography and video art. This project is the culmination of sustained research, also facilitated by virtual and digital frameworks; a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York; and the international symposium Beyond the Frame: Contemporary Photography from Africa and the Diaspora, co-organized by The Walther Collection and Columbia University. Artur Walther

The Walther Collection is a private international art collection dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary photography with special emphasis on the works of African and Asian artists. The inaugural exhibition of the collection will open to the public in June 2010 in the village of Burlafingen near Ulm, Germany.

OBJECT:PHOTO shifts the dialogue about modernist photography from an emphasis on the subject and the image to the actual photographic object, created by a certain artist at a particular time and present today in its unique physicality. This shift is especially significant for a study of the period during which photography developed a distinctive formal language. A growing awareness of the rarity of images made between the two world wars has altered historians' considerations, encouraging new approaches privileging the originality of each work and the density of references each contains. This richly illustrated publication culminates a four-year collaborative research endeavor between The Museum of Modern Art's Departments of Photography and Conservation, and nearly 30 visiting scholars, on the material and aesthetic evolution of avant-garde photography in the early twentieth century. The 341 modernist photographs known as The Thomas Walther Collection, a major museum acquisition made in 2001, is presented in its entirety, establishing a new standard of depth for the medium. Essays by curators, researchers, and conservators consider the history of collecting from this era to the present and how deepening knowledge has shifted the perspective on the medium; the material facts of the Walther pictures as a baseline for understanding the development of photographic materials in this era; and how the intellectual formation of the writers of critical photographic publications of the era and the societal and cultural pressures of that historical moment inflected the photography's sense of its own history. Together with thematic, object-based case studies of groups of pictures that demonstrate new approaches in specific, divergent examples, these contributions reanimate the dialogue on this formative era in photography.