Met Museum Gifted Coveted Trove of 6,500 Photos

While there’s an evident cool factor emanating from S.J. Moodley’s photo “Boy in a wicker chair” (c. 1978), there’s a lot more to it than just a confident young boy with an eye for the finer things in life. The portrait was one of over a thousand taken in Apartheid-era South Africa by the ethnically Indian photographer nicknamed “Kitty” at his portrait studio between 1972 and 1984. His family-run business, Kitty’s Studio, took headshots for Black and other non-White clientele who were required to carry segregative passbook identification by law. The space enabled people of marginalized backgrounds to present themselves with personal agency over their style and dress, becoming a community hub for them to document their cultural heritage.

We probably wouldn’t know about Moodley if it weren’t for a stroke of fate with Columbia Professor Steven Dubin, who was provided with a box of negatives that sat in a Cape Town garage for decades. Now, the aforementioned portrait — and approximately 6,500 other photos from around the world — is headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of a promised gift from German-American art collector Artur Walther.

The Met announced the forthcoming bequest from Walther, whose global collection specializes in 20th-century, modern, contemporary, and vernacular photography, last Wednesday, May 14. The trove is set to be incorporated into The Met’s collection displays in the forthcoming Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art and the newly renovated Rockefeller Wing of art from Africa, the Ancient Americas, and Oceania. Works from the collection will also feature in two forthcoming exhibitions coming up this year and in 2028.

A former general partner at Goldman Sachs, Walther began building his photography collection upon his retirement in 1994, when he also started practicing in the medium itself. He began collecting classic and modernist German photography and soon expanded to explore photo- and time-based artists throughout China and across the African continent amid periods of immense social, technological, and economic shifts throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Walther launched a namesake museum in Neu-Ulm, Germany, in 2010, displaying various photographs and other works by artists including Ai Weiwei, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Yang Fudong, Hai Bo.

In recent years, Walther has pivoted toward acquiring historical vernacular photography, across medical, scientific, commercial, and private family-oriented spheres like that of Moodley’s.

“Many are just random, but others are sociologically relevant as they say something about individualities and the way people investigate or represent themselves,” he once said in an interview about the vernacular photos in his collection.

Selections from the promised gift will be interspersed throughout the renovated galleries of the Rockefeller Wing upon its May 31 re-opening, including a dedicated wall for rotating photography displays in dialogue with other media. Additionally, international modernist and contemporary objects from Walther’s collection will also be spotlighted in the Tang Wing after its slated 2030 completion.

Walther said in a statement that he hopes promising his collection to The Met will “make the artworks available to its diverse constituency of visitors from all over the world.”