Still Life. Photographs & Love Stories. Kate Sterlin. antologyeditions
Hardcover. Interview by Arooj Aftab. Afterword by Tessa Thompson. 192 pages, 74 Images
For decades, photographer Kate Sterlin has made an artistic practice of examining the boundaries between individual, family, and community. In her first book, Still Life: Photographs & Love Stories, she uses intimacy in all its forms to tell a story of life, death, family, and race in America. Pairing lyrical photography with poetic writings, Still Life is a dreamlike narrative examining kinship and romance, friendships and tragedies, the complexities of Black identity, and personal and generational loss across a lifetime. It is a testament to one artist’s commitment to creation and a profound blend of the personal and the universal.
“To infuse the everyday with a sense of historical significance, poetry, and dignity is to affirm that the private lives we lead deserve inquiry, not only from others but from ourselves. To express the ineffable, to immortalize it in ink, is to prompt us to explore the things we’ve never dared to admit. Being interested in witnessing, summoning, and drawing close to those moments, as Kate has been for a lifetime, means being acutely aware that the fugitive present, in all its texture, will mostly be forgotten but always undeniably felt. With a loving, intimate record of it, we can begin to understand why.” Tessa Thompson.
Kate Sterlin is a photographer and writer currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. Her talent and passion for storytelling is a rich part of her artistic vision. Her work has always been deeply personal and began with striking portraits of her father. Much of her photography is about family, documenting and understanding the experience of coming from a fractured, mixed-race, nomadic tribe. She has developed a large body of work in the categories of documentary street photography and intimate portraiture. Her methods are rooted in a purist style and she’s after the truth. As a result, she is able to transcend the raw emotional intimacy inside the stillness of her frame. Her writing is similar – distilled, letting the essence of the story expose itself. She received mentorship from the late Mary Ellen Mark. Her work has appeared in group and solo shows in New York and the Bay Area. Her film ‘Sometimes’, a lyrical essayistic meditation on family has appeared in numerous national and international film festivals. Her images were recently featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vogue. Her first book Still Life will be released in 2024 with Anthology Editions.
