Events of the Social: Portraiture and Collective Agency

The Walther Collection is an art foundation dedicated to the critical understanding of historical and contemporary photography and related media. Through a program of international exhibitions, in-depth collecting, original research and scholarly publications, The Walther Collection aims to highlight the social uses of photography and expand the history of the medium. The collection's diverse activities are centered on its expansive holdings of African, Chinese, Japanese and European modern and contemporary photography and media, nineteenth-century photography from Europe and Africa, and vernacular lens-based imagery from across the globe. Steidl's books with the collection include Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity (2010), Appropriated Landscapes (2011), Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive (2013), Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art (2017), Samuel Fosso's AUTOPORTRAIT (2020) and Jo Ractliffe's Photographs 1980s - now (2021).

This book is a comprehensive investigation into photographic works by artists from the African continent and its diaspora. Taking the politics of the "colonial gaze" as its starting point, Events of the Social looks at the diverse complexity of the nineteenth-century archive through a selection of vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards and album pages. Three generations of African artists from the 1940s till now then chart the changing features of African societies through portraiture, exploring notions of the self, gender, sexuality, race, social status and politics. The book also examines landscape and the built environment, showing how architecture and spatial planning convey social order and ideology while reflecting experiences of migration, colonialism, war and industrialization. Another group of artists, born after the mid-1970s, explores issues of social identity, lineage, questions of belonging and personal experiences. Artists featured include Sammy Baloji, Jodi Bieber, Mimi Cherono Ng'ok, Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, David Goldblatt, Seydou Keïta, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé and Mikhael Subotzky.Co-published with The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm and New York