The Darkroom

There’s something funny about falling in love with photography in a darkroom while making out with a crush. Sarah Small was 13 at some art camp in Washington D.C. when this happened—the kiss was forgettable, the medium wasn’t. She got a Pentax K1000 not long after and started wandering the city with it, shooting everything. Her sister Rachel, red-haired and freckled, became her first real subject, whether she wanted to be or not.

Now she lives in Brooklyn, and has been taking a self-portrait every day since 1997—almost three decades of daily images, which tells you something about what hooked her. She also sings with a Balkan a cappella group called Black Sea Hotel, and her photographs have run in Vogue, Life, The New York Times. American Photo recently named her one of the most important photographers working.

What makes her work distinct is how she photographs people—wildly different types, every kind of face and body, every style—and shoots them in colors that feel almost painfully vivid. Hot, strange, unsettling colors that somehow make each person look more real, more themselves. It’s like she’s found a way to show the specific strangeness inside every face, the thing that makes that person unrepeatable.

I don’t think she’s making a political statement or trying to say something grand about human diversity. I think she’s just paying attention, the way you do when you’re learning something new and it matters. You look at the details. You notice what others miss. And once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it. That’s what happened in the darkroom, and she never left.