Light Found in a Darkroom at Thirteen

Sarah Small was thirteen when she kissed her crush in the darkroom of a summer art camp in Washington D.C., and came out of that darkroom in love—not with him, but with photography. She got a Pentax K1000, started shooting the streets of her hometown, and practiced on her red-haired freckle-covered sister Rachel at home. That origin story has the right shape to it: a wrong turn that becomes the whole journey.

She works out of Brooklyn now, and since 1997 has photographed herself every single day with a Polaroid camera, intending it as a lifelong project. When she needs something entirely different, she sings Balkan folk music a cappella in a four-person group called Black Sea Hotel. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Life, and The New York Times, and American Photo named her one of thirteen photographers worth paying attention to.

What she’s known for is a particular compositional instinct: gathering completely different kinds of people into a single frame and shooting them in bright, almost aggressive color. The stated aim is to let each subject’s specific emotional response breathe—not to merge them but to let the friction between them produce something. It works. The images feel simultaneously chaotic and composed, like a party where nobody knows each other yet but everyone is still somehow in the right place. The clash of types, the loudness of the palette—you look longer than you expected to.

I keep coming back to the daily Polaroid project. One photograph of yourself every day since 1997. That’s thousands of images of the same face accumulating change so slowly it’s almost invisible until you stack the years. Effort. Memory. Time. Most self-documentation projects feel narcissistic from the outside; this one feels more like maintenance. Like keeping a log nobody asked for, but that proves you were here.