At the turn of the sixteenth century, a Danish doctor named Ole Worm took the Earth and squeezed it into a single room of his home. The space brimmed with things of scientific interest, whimsically arranged. Natural specimens dangled from rafters and perched on shelves. Bones and minerals mingled with clockwork automata and botanical samples. The Museum Wormianum was just one of many such collections compiled in Europe during a time brightly characterized as the Age of Discovery, when the promise of increased understanding encouraged travelers to map the globe and catalog its marvels.

Camera of Wonders takes the Wunderkammer, as such proto-museums came to be called, as its point of departure. It is inspired as well by the exhibition The Family of Man, organized in 1955 by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—a photography show that had the express aim of showing universal threads that recur throughout time and across national borders.

Camera of Wonders is an associative arrangement of more than one hundred photographs from CIAC (Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel) and the Kadist Art Foundation. The images are ordered to suggest formal connections, uniting artists across traditional divisions. Visitors are left to their own devices, as if exploring Worm’s cabinet without him. As they advance through the rows of pictures, they are free to slip between black and white and full color, between abstraction and representation. The work of emerging artists appears next to long-established icons. Photographs from decades ago are arrayed next to ones made today, and the subject matter ranges widely. Absent an imposed, linear, historical narrative, possibilities for connection proliferate.

• Curatorship: Jens Hoffmann
• Artists: Berenice Abbott, Doug Aitken, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Associated Press/ U.S. Air Force, Roger Ballen, Tom Baril, Lothar Baumgarten, Wimo Ambala Bayang, Peter Beard, Bernd & Hilla Becher, JulieBéna, Lucas Blalock, Karl Blossfeldt, Erwin Blumenfeld, Bill Brandt, Brassaï, Elina Brotherus, Jeff Burton, Arabella Campbell, Sarah Conaway, Nicolás Consuegra, Mario Cravo Neto, Alexandre da Cunha, William Eggleston, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Rodney Graham, Andreas Gursky, John Gutmann, Jonathan Hernández, Candida Höfer, Horst P. Horst, John Houck, Barbara Kasten, Seydou Keïta, Annette Kelm, André Kertész, Luisa Lambri, Elad Lassry, Adolf Lazi, Jochen Lempert, Matt Lipps, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Asier Mendizabal, Enrique Metinides, Tina Modotti, Jonathan Monk, Charlotte Moth, Jean- Luc Moulène, Óscar Muñoz, Davida Nemeroff, Kori Newkirk, Kiyoshi Niiyama, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Irving Penn, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Pratchaya Phinthong, John Pirola, Albert Renger- Patzsch, Thomas Ruff, Asha Schechter, Collier Schorr, Erin Shirreff, Aaron Siskind, Simon Starling, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ron Terada, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall, Weegee, James Welling, Edward Weston, Chris Wiley, Mariana Yampolsky.
• Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico from October 27th, 2015 to February 14th, 2016
• Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Medellin, Colombia from April 20th, 2016 to June 26th, 2016
• App available
• Within the framework of this exhibition, several interviews were made to the curator and the artists: