Seth Poppel, a lifelong collector, is the media’s go-to guy for yearbooks of the stars—from Patti Smith (“Class Clown”) to Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“twirler”) to Leonardo DiCaprio (“Most Bizarre”).

The Thomas Walther Collection—341 photographs by 148 artists—represents the innovative vision of the 1920s and ’30s, a transformative period of modern photography and the foundation of our photo-based ...