Eastman Museum LogoFeaturing renowned artists Deana Lawson, Philip Montgomery, and Ahndraya Parlato

Rochester, N.Y. (September 9, 2026) —This fall, the George Eastman Museum will present three lectures with renowned artists Deana Lawson, Philip Montgomery, and Ahndraya Parlato on select dates throughout September and October as part of the annual Wish You Were Here lecture series. For more than 26 years, Wish You Were Here has brought artists and photojournalists to Rochester, NY to share their stories and photographs.

Wish You Were Here: Philip Montgomery

Wednesday, September 16, 6 p.m., Dryden Theatre
Philip Montgomery chronicles the complexities of American life, with its fractures and forms of connection. His images speak to an America in a constant state of transition. Montgomery is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. His work has been recognized by World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, and the National Press Photographers Association. Montgomery will be in conversation with Phil Taylor, associate curator in the Department of Photography.
 

Wish You Were Here: Ahndraya Parlato
Thursday, October 8, 6 p.m., Dryden Theatre
Ahndraya Parlato is an artist and writer who combines photography and writing to explore psychology, fantasy, and perception. Throughout her career, she has repeatedly engaged with the notion of “reality” and various gendered social constructs. Parlato has a bachelor's degree from Bard College and a master's degree from California College of the Arts. She has published four books: TIME TO KILL, (MACK Books, 2026), Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (MACK Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Parlato has been awarded grants from Light Work, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Joy of Giving Something Foundation, and is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. Ahndraya is currently an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

A book signing will follow the lecture. Parlato's exhibition Ahndraya Parlato: TIME TO KILL, currently on display in the Project Gallery, will be open for viewing.

Wish You Were Here: Deana Lawson
Thursday, October 22, 6 p.m., Dryden Theatre
Deana Lawson makes photographs that explore the Black familiar and its relationship to lore, global histories, and mystery traditions. She transforms observational picture-making into a powerful mode of expression, critique, and celebration. Romance and intimacy between subjects, as well as ritual and spirituality, appear throughout Lawson’s work, often within the same image. Her photographs emphasize formal approaches to film commonly associated with both Western and African twentieth-century portraiture practices, in addition to appropriation and uses of vernacular imagery. Lawson engages her subjects with intention and intuition alike, in staged situations characterized by the piercing directness of the model’s gaze. With their meticulous composition filled with personal artifacts and decor, these portraits underscore the psychological connections between people and their domestic spaces, fusing biography, symbolism, and cultural observation, and creating expansive images of contemporary personhood.

The Wish You Were Here series is generously supported by Thomas N. Tischer, PhD.

Admission
Free for members and students with ID, for SNAP and EBT cardholders and their families, and for active-duty military personnel and their families. $15 nonmembers. For additional information visit eastman.org/wish-you-were-here. 

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 450,000 photographs, 31,000 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 its L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation’s graduate program (a collaboration with the University of Rochester) makes critical contributions to film preservation. The George Eastman Museum is supported with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. For more information, visit eastman.org.

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ATTN. Media: High-resolution images for Wish You Were Here can be found here.