In Conversation with Sara Terry
Sara Terry is a photographer, board member for The Everyday Projects and founder of The Aftermath Project and 10(X) Editions, a series of handmade, limited edition books.
Long before the iPhone was even a thing, Sara Terry was shooting images all over the world with a flip phone. What began as a response to a difficult time in her life led her to countless countries. Along the way, she used her cell phone to document her experiences.
Photos from “mobile i” by Sara Terry, captured with a Sony Ericsson P910.
“I wanted to keep a diary, something as small and intimate as a Moleskin journal that could be slipped into my back pocket — but a diary kept in images, not words,” wrote Sara in the introduction of “mobile i,” a 3-inch book that folds up like an accordion, inspired by Japanese “pillow books.”
Though the book was never published, she hopes to one day bring it to the printed page with the help of Everyday Africa book designer Teun van der Heijden, who shared her excitement for the project years ago when she first showed it to him.
Because of her in-depth experience making images from around the world with a cell phone, it seems only natural that Sara was asked to be one of four board members of The Everyday Projects. (Not to mention that she’s also the founder of a non-profit that celebrates the work of underreported, underrepresented photography projects.)
Photo by @siegfried_chu, taken in North Korea, selected during Sara’s curation.
But for Sara, the movement is about something much deeper than taking pictures with a cell phone.
“One of the reasons I love the Everyday feeds so much is that it’s really about celebrating an individual’s voice, not an establishment voice, not a media voice, not a filtered voice, but the individual’s voice, the way that person in that moment saw the world around them…That’s exactly the kind of thinking that leads to tolerance and empathy.”
It is this philosophy that also guided her choices as curator of the @EverydayEverywhere feed. After browsing through thousands of images over the course of a week and selecting one each day, Sara says seeing the world through someone else’s eyes is an extraordinary gift. She considered more than compositions, nice light and moments; she was also interested in everything that happens outside the edges of the frame.
Photo by @hosseinesmaeilii, selected during Sara’s curation.
“The purpose of Everyday Everywhere is to be truly open and democratic, and not just a recycling site for the other [Everyday] feeds. These people who are hashtagging their photos [with] Everyday Everywhere are saying ‘Listen to me, look at me, look at what I saw today,’ and the Everyday Everywhere feed should be honoring that.”
As curators repost their favorite images from those on Instagram using the #EverydayEverywhere hashtag, there’s a tendency to select ones that have already been published on official Everyday feeds.
“I wanted to kind of kick the wheels on that to say ‘Come on, these people around the world want to be part of this conversation.’”
Sara said she deliberately selected images from accounts not associated with the Everyday Projects and from people who didn’t have a lot of followers or “likes.”
“That’s just re-creating a system that so many of us have already rebelled against — the idea that photo editors, book publishers and gallerists hold some kind of special status for determining what is of value. Unfortunately, in the social media age, we’ve just reconstructed that narrow, elitist system into something new, into how many followers you have or how many likes your photo gets.”
According to Sara, by following along with a “pack mentality,” what is most at stake is the individual. In her favorite class, “Finding Your Visual Voice,” she teaches photographers how to work outside constraint.
Photos selected during Sara’s curation by @julia_pavlutina taken in Moscow, Russia.
Photo by @jamalsajjadi taken in Golshar, Iran.
“In photojournalism you have an assignment and you’re expected to deliver something — that’s working within a constraint. And it’s a reasonable one, I understand it. But, we don’t have to let those constraints define everything we shoot for an assignment. Nor should those constraints define how we see photography.”
@EverydayEverywhere invites guest curators to select their favorite images on Instagram using the #EverydayEverywhere hashtag. If you’re interested in curating, please get in touch: everydayeverywhereproject@gmail.com