Sunday, May 10, 2026
ICP (International Center of Photography)
84 Ludlow Street, New York, NY

The festival runs from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Sunday (Check the specific talk schedule on the day, usually held in the 2nd-floor library or workshop space).

Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream: Agata Grzybowska & Adriana T. Letorney in conversation features photographer Agata Grzybowska & Adriana T. Letorney, founder of Visura, for a conversation about Grzybowska’s recent book Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream, co-authored with Chloé Zhao and Jessie Buckley. They will discuss Grzybowska’s experience as an on-set photographer for films such as Hamnet (2025), A Real Pain (2024) & The Zone of Interest (2023), exploring the relationship between cinema and photography. The book features intimate, dreamlike imagery of the film’s cast, including Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, blending documentary realism with a poetic, historical aesthetic.

Agata Grzybowska (b. 1984) Polish visual artist and documentary photographer based in Poland. Represented by Ag Galerie in Iran.

In her work, she is interested in people. She travels across the world depicting individuals in difficult, often life-threatening situations. While working, her principle is to get as close as possible to people and their stories. She considers herself a medium which enables other, underprivileged voices to be heard. She strongly believes that everyone has the right to their own story. She graduated from the Direction of Photography at the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Lodz. She has showed her works in Poland, Sydney, Los Angeles, Tokio, Tehran, Moscow, Madrid, Athens and Arles.

Recently she has collaborated with  such film directors as Jonathan Glazer, Chloé Zhao, Jessie Eisenberg and Charlie Kaufmann.

She graduated from the Direction of Photography at the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Lodz. She teaches history of photojournalism and ways of seeing (culture of visuality) at SWPS University in Warsaw. She is Leica Camera Ambasador.

Today, she works as a freelancer, collaborating with magazines and media platforms in Poland and abroad, i.a. TIME, Telegraph Magazine, CNN, Der Spiegel, World Health Organization, AP, LFI Blog Online, Bloomberg UK, Vogue Polska, Pismo, Tygodnik Powszechny, Newsweek Polska, Digital Camera Poland, Multimedia Gazeta, etc., but also focuses on personal projects related to photography and film.

Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream is the debut book by Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, 2020), actor Jessie Buckley, and photographer Agata Grzybowska, created during the making of Zhao’s latest film Hamnet (2025).

Rooted in the expansive dream-work that shaped Zhao’s creative process, the book emerges from a series of artistic rituals shared between these three collaborators, through which Zhao’s cinematic storytelling, Buckley’s mesmerising writings, and Grzybowska’s haunting photographs were made. Brought together in this book, they conjure a parallel telling of the story of Hamnet, the son of William Shakespeare.

Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream unfolds as a quiet companion to the film: not a document of its making, but a powerful reimagining that exists somewhere in the threshold between the worlds of waking and dreaming, reality and illusion, life and death.

Lead image: Agata Grzybowska, from Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream (MACK, 2025). © Focus Features LLC. Courtesy of the artist, Focus Features LLC, and MACK.