The George Eastman Museum has announced the fall lineup for its Wish You Were Here lecture series. For more than 17 years, this popular photography lecture series has brought artists and photojournalists to the Rochester to share their stories and photographs from around the world. The series, which kicked off on August 23 with actor and photographer, Jason Lee will continue on Thursday, September 13 at 6 p.m., with photographer Andrea Modica.
For decades, Modica has used an 8×10‑inch view camera to create portraits of wide-ranging subjects: minor league baseball players in Florida, a fifteen-year portrait of a girl from Upstate New York, a family-run slaughterhouse in Colorado, human skulls found on the grounds of a mental hospital, a horse clinic in Italy, high school best friends, and, most recently, participants in the January 1 Mummer’s Day Parade in South Philadelphia. Her photographs have been featured in many magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Newsweek, and American Photo.
The Wish You Were Here series continues on October 11 at 6 p.m., with Kiliii Yuyan: On the Sea Ice, We Wear White—The Importance of Cultural Immersion in Photography. Yuyan’s mission is to rewrite the narratives of minority and indigenous cultures—especially those who live close to the land. Against a backdrop of ecological upheaval, he shows us the essential connection to nature that has kept traditional cultures alive for millennia. From being adopted by an Inuit whaling family to becoming a shoulder to cry on for suicidal youth, he has gone deep into native communities to create photographs that are changing the perception of modern indigenous culture. Yuyan is an indigenous Hezhe and Chinese-American photographer, filmmaker, and journalist whose award winning work has been published by the Nature Conservancy, NPR, Pacific Standard, and National Geographic Traveler.
The final lecture in the series will be held on November 15 at 6 p.m. with Anastasia Samoylova: The Flood of Images, The Images of Flood. Samoylova is a Miami-based artist and photographer whose work examines environmentalism, consumerism, and the picturesque through the tools and language of digital media and commercial photography. Her work participates in the landscape photography tradition while scrutinizing the consumable products it generates.
All Wish You Were Here lectures will be held in the Dryden Theatre, and admission is free for museum members. Admission for nonmembers: $6 general, $3 students (with ID). Each talk is followed by a book signing. Doors open 45 minutes before the lecture begins, and the museum’s café will be open for dinner, coffee, or dessert.
The Wish You Were Here photography lecture series is generously supported by museum member Dr. Thomas N. Tischer.
About the George Eastman Museum
Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the United States, located on the historic Rochester estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. Its holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs, 28,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related to George Eastman. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active publishing program and, through its two joint master’s degree programs with the University of Rochester, makes critical contributions to the fields of film preservation and of photographic preservation and collection management. For more information, visit eastman.org
