Creative: Sara Terry (1955-2025)

We lost a good one. I don’t know the details, but she is gone. “I have really bad news,” my wife said as the tears rolled down her face. “Sara died.” The words left my wife’s mouth, traveled through the cool mountain air, mixed with birdsong and the howl of fall winds, filtered through the tiny hairs in my ear before being sucked into the translatable meaning in my mind. Sound to word to meaning. Moments of hesitation, incomprehension, wonder, and then the fateful realization. No matter how I run the math, the numbers don’t compute.

I’m here writing this post because of Sara.

Not entirely, mind you, but in part, so let’s just call it an important part, a strategic part, a part that filled a considerable, obtuse shape on the board. In short, it began in Los Angeles. A phone call, Sara, a reference from Paolo, a meeting to discuss things, an edit of her photographs, a few questions, a deal to help each other, the first of several trips abroad together, and then a long-term relationship that ebbed and flowed like breath from the lungs. She rose up and up, while I fell into the solitude I prefer.

I met Sara when she moved to Los Angeles. She was an accomplished writer. Rolling Stone credits to her name, among many others, but she had taken a liking to photography and had enrolled in a workshop in Sicily. During the workshop, she met Paolo. When Paolo learned Sara lived in Los Angeles, he said, “You should meet Dan.” This is how it began. She asked if I would look at her work, which I did. She was raw at the time, new to the camera and composition, but she was intelligent and driven. She was curious. I told her I was keen on writing. We made a deal. She would help me with the words, and I would help her with the images.

The images I edited were from Sicily and looked like something shot in the 1950s. “Where is this?” I asked. “What is this?” A documentarian’s dream. Religious processions with ties to a variety of origins, but what caught my eye was the lack of other photographers, the lack of tourists. Sara said, “We should go back together.” So, we did, eventually making three trips over three years. I went on to make two more trips to complete my story.

Sara began visiting Bosnia to focus on the aftermath of the war, and I began to show my work from Sicily. I was a finalist for a first book prize, the images were published several times editorially, a gallery in Los Angeles represented the images, and I was invited to a juried show where I was approached by not one but two book publishers wanting to publish the work. (I turned them both down.) But I had also begun to sour on the industry and on being a photographer. Sara was all in and making the moves you need to make to become someone in the professional photography world.

During a rare moment when we were both in Los Angeles, we got together to discuss recent developments. She said two things that stuck with me. “You don’t take up much physical space.” This might sound like a dig, but that’s not what she meant. This was her way of paying a compliment after watching me work in the field. I had always felt that a good documentary photographer could almost disappear while working. Sucking in their energy to better flow in foreign worlds. She and I had been around other photographers with sizable egos and presences that demanded attention. This was her way of saying, “You have something.”

The second thing she said was, “I don’t understand you.” This requires a bit more to unpack. I had just finished my fifth trip to Sicily, had found success with the work, but recoiled at the idea of living in a world designed by the industry. After turning down the book publishers, I had self-published a small book of my Sicily photographs, and the books were selling as fast as I could print them. THIS was the moment I went all in on self-publishing and began to build my own ecosystem outside of what the traditional industry had in store for me. “You spend five years on a project, edit it, print it, and then put it in a drawer and go start a new project,” she said. “I just don’t get you.”

Not wanting what others want can cause friction, and I think it did with Sara and I. Nothing too dramatic, just two people with different goals moving in different directions, hoping to connect with different worlds. Sara was heading straight for the industry, but with a twist. Sara was big picture, long-form, community-driven, and she spent more time thinking about others than she did thinking about herself. This is plutonium rare. She founded The Aftermath Project, formed her own micro-publishing imprint, which printed the work of other photographers, and began teaching. Photography, storytelling, grant writing, etc. And then she began to make films, several of which garnered all kinds of acclaim. In baseball terms, she was a five-tool player.

I don’t remember the last time I saw her. My wife has photographs, and I’m wearing clothing I still wear, which means it was relatively recent. What I do remember is me giving her grief, and she giving it right back. Playful grief. “Who is your favorite photographer?” I would ask. “Oh, you for sure,” she would say, immediately laughing hysterically. “I knew it,” I would answer. “Oh, you just keep thinking that,” she would add. “A legend in your own mind.”

So, ya. I’m here because of her. That suggestion of going to Sicily together, the success I found with the work, the first foray into self-publishing, which led me to Blurb, where I still sit fifteen years later. That simple, seemingly innocent suggestion, “We should go together,” changed the course of my life and career. I don’t like goodbyes, and I don’t like the American treatment of death. Sadness and mourning. No, doesn’t work for me. When it comes to death, I’m Mexican. I prefer to celebrate rather than to mourn.

I know if she could reach out from wherever she is now, and could flick me in the ear, she would. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she would say. “You aren’t all that, not yet.” And I know if fate dealt a different hand, she would still be working her ass off for the benefit of other people. She was a true believer in what photography, filmmaking, and storytelling could do. She lives on via the work she produced and the people she impacted.

Younger creatives would do themselves well by studying her work and realizing the lift required to do what she did. Her world was centered on story, not on herself, another rare bird in a photographic world dominated by self-promoters. She leaves behind a void, and I’m hoping someone takes the baton and carries on what she started. It’s what she would want.

And to Sara, “Ce lo fata.” (Inside joke.) You made me more, and I won’t forget.