Jeff Ferrell

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In fact, most everything you find has in one way or another filtered out from the lives of those who once owned it, while still suggesting something of the pace and patterns by which they lived. ... But amidst all this ongoing detritus of daily life there’s one sort of item that especially stands out: the discarded photo. Jeff Ferrell, Last Picture, published by Atopia Projects, 2022

Jeff Ferrell, a sociologist, scavenger, and author of several books, has scrounged trash piles and containers most every day for half a century. In conjunction with the recent publication of his book Last Picture, Ferrell presents “Last Picture: Trash, Photography, Dislocation,” in which he displays and discusses some of the thousands of discarded photographs he has salvaged from the trash heaps of Fort Worth over the past twenty years. He argues that the process of preserving these photographs raises a host of moral and aesthetic issues – and that the photographs themselves exist as visual apparitions, embodying dynamics of loss and dislocation, and hiding as much as they reveal.

Jeff Ferrell is the author of books including Crimes of Style, Tearing Down the Streets, Empire of Scrounge, and Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge – and, with Gavin Morrison and Fraser Stables, Last Picture. Ferrell is founding and current editor of the New York University Press book series Alternative Criminology, and is one of the founding editors of Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, winner of the ALPSP Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal.   
 

This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public. Lectures begin at 6 pm in the Modern’s auditorium. Seating is at 5:30 pm. A livestream broadcast of the lecture will be available here.

A limited number of tickets (limit two per person) will be available for purchase ($5) from 10 am until 3 pm the day of the lecture online. Free admission tickets (limit two per person) are available at the Modern’s information desk beginning at 4 pm on the day of the lecture.  

Museum galleries will close at 6 pm. Café Modern’s bar is open until 6 pm (no food service available.) Lectures will not be broadcast into the café this season.

The Tuesday Evenings at the Modern Lecture Series is made possible with funding from Humanities Texas and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the federal ARP Act.