Guest Lecture - The Vanishing Archive
Join us at the Fishers Island Community Center on Thursday 16th July at 6pm for a lecture with Kira Pollack, a leading creative director and photo editor known for pioneering new approaches to visual storytelling.
Talk Description:
The world's greatest photojournalists have spent their careers bearing witness to history -- but their archives tell only part of the story. For every image published, hundreds of thousands more remain unseen, uncatalogued, and uncontextualized. More urgently, the knowledge that gives those images their meaning -- the intent, the context, what the photographer saw and understood in the moment -- exists only in the minds of the people who made them.
Drawing on her research as a Walter Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and Distinguished Fellow at Stanford's Starling Lab, Kira Pollack explores what happens when that knowledge disappears, and how an unexpected combination of oral history and artificial intelligence might offer a way to capture it before it's lost -- preserving not just the images, but the testimony of the witnesses who made them.
About our Guest Lecturer, Kira Pollack
Bio:
Kira Pollack spent twenty-five years shaping how the world sees history, as Deputy Photo Editor at The New York Times Magazine, Director of Photography at TIME, and Creative Director at Vanity Fair, where she collectively oversaw hundreds of covers.
Her work has earned two Emmy Awards, five National Magazine Awards, and the Lucie Award for Photo Editor of the Year.
Kira served as 2026 Global Jury Chair of World Press Photo and recently completed a Walter Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School and was a Distinguished Fellow at Stanford's Starling Lab, where she researched the intersection of AI, photojournalism, and the preservation of visual truth.
Christopher Morris reviewing his images in his archive from Moscow in 1993. (Christopher Morris)