World Monuments Fund: Irreplaceable: 60 of Humanity's Most Treasured Places

Join us for a conversation with president and chief executive officer of World Monuments Fund Bénédicte de Montlaur, New York Times best-selling author André Aciman, and Director of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive, at the International Center for Photography Cynthia Young to celebrate WMF's 60th anniversary publication.

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A call to safeguard some of the most important monuments of our shared cultural heritage.

From the fabled towers of Babylon and Angkor Wat to the colossal stone heads of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and secret gardens of Beijing’s Forbidden City, each of the sixty sites featured in this lavishly illustrated book are must-visit destinations for every cultured traveler, representing the pinnacles of human achievement over millennia and across the globe.

Yet despite their beauty, fame, and importance, these treasured places face existential challenges arising from climate change, war, financial pressures, and—increasingly—over-tourism. From its founding in 1965, World Monuments Fund (WMF) has focused the public’s attention on these dangers while developing solutions that will ensure these sites will be enjoyed for generations to come.

Primarily a visual celebration, but with incisive essays by some of today’s greatest minds putting the world on notice, this beautiful volume captures and celebrates the awe and wonder of these sixty most significant sites. Taken together, the sites safeguarded by WMF can rightly be considered the world’s great museum without walls—a collection that connects us to the past while helping us better understand the present and, ultimately, the shared legacy of all humankind.

Bénédicte de Montlaur is president and chief executive officer of World Monuments Fund (WMF), the world’s foremost private organization dedicated to saving extraordinary places while empowering the communities around them. She is responsible for defining WMF’s strategic vision, currently implementing that vision in more than 30 countries around the world and leading a team that spans the globe. Her background mixes culture and the arts, politics, international diplomacy, and human rights.

Photo Credit: Christopher Ferguson

André Aciman’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, and Granta, as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. He is the author of, among other works, Call Me by Your Name, which is now a major motion picture. His most recent book is Roman Year: A Memoir.

Cynthia Young is the Director of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive, at the International Center for Photography. She has curated numerous exhibitions on photojournalism in the 1930–50s, including Capa in Color; We Went Back: Photographs from Europe 1933-1956 by Chim and The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives of Robert Capa, Chim and Gerda Taro. These exhibitions have traveled to France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Hungary and Sweden. Until 2020, Young was the curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at ICP, where she worked since 2000.

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