Acclaimed photographer Cara Romero joins Amy Scott, the Autry’s Executive Vice President of Research and Interpretation, for a wide-ranging conversation about art, Indigenous storytelling, and the histories and futures of the American West.

Cara Romero’s photographs are immediately arresting: cinematic, richly colored, and grounded in the lives and perspectives of contemporary Native people. Behind their visual power is a sustained exploration of cultural memory, identity, place, and the stories through which the American West is understood.

Featured in Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, Romero’s photograph Oil & Gold offers a powerful lens on Indigenous presence, land, extraction, and displacement in Los Angeles. From that starting point, the conversation will consider the ideas and experiences that inform Romero’s practice, as well as the ways photography shapes how we understand the American West.

With support from the John and LaRee Caughey Foundation, the biennial Caughey Lecture brings artists, scholars, and public thinkers into conversation around critical questions facing the American West.