Throughout the modern era, photography has been deployed to catalogue the world and its people. Photographers and institutions have struggled laboriously to arrange, to order, and to catalogue this infinitude of images into coherent presentations and archives. This exhibition investigates how these progressive archives, utilizing the formal tools of classi cation, have opened critical challenges to the synthetic conventions of photographic realism. From seminal works by German Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) artists Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander, to more recent series by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Richard Avedon, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Ai Weiwei, Typology, Taxinomy and Seriality utilizes modern and contemporary photography from The Walther Collection to address how conceptual performance, serial portraiture, and time-based work have developed around the globe. The exhibition proposes a political and philosophical reading of these works, a dialogue that considers not only the ambivalent meanings of the documentary images but also the social conditions of photography itself. Artur Walther