Written by Elyse Moody.
Photographs courtesy of Sara Kerens.
A little more than a year ago, photographer Sara Kerens was enjoying a steady, growing freelance business in Dallas. Her work leaned toward journalistic service features: She had shot everything from interiors to local restaurants for D Magazine, D Home, The Dallas Observer, and other outlets (fried chicken has never looked so good). But her blog gave her space to experiment artistically. She posted her fun “People I Know” series—gorgeously shot photographs of her industrious, creative friends—and spreads of fashion models with neon-tinged hair to it regularly.
Then, one of those blog posts changed the course of her career.
Sara brainstormed a concept shoot with Anthropologie goods, photographed it, posted the photos to her blog, and tweeted it. Within a few minutes, several of her friends had retweeted her pics. Within half an hour, Anthropologie itself retweeted them. Next, the company responded via tweet. Finally, a representative e-mailed her to say they’d love to work with her.
After a whirlwind week shooting at Anthropologie headquarters in Philadelphia, Sara decided to move to New York City in March 2012. She traded her three-bedroom apartment in a Dallas complex ironically called the Village for a bedroom the size of her Texas closet in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The dream? To throw herself into the fashion fray—and see what other kinds of assignments she might land in a bigger, broader market.
Since then, her work has taken off in a multitude of directions. She’s shot for clients as varied as Harper’s Bazaar and Refinery29; photographed President Obama and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi; worked with the impossibly stylish bloggers Margaret Zhang of Shine By Three and Jessica Stein of Tuula Vintage (not to mention Fashiontographer); and made the circuit at fashion weeks in New York and London. For the spring/summer 2014 season, Christian Siriano hired Sara as house photographer, and she photographed Katherine Feiner’s SS14 collection and lookbook.
But fashion photography is only part of what Sara wants to do. “I don’t want to get to be 80 and realize I’ve only shot models—that’s only a piece of my personality and interest,” she says. She’s engaged in using photography to support causes working for human justice and environmental awareness, and she recently worked with Fabien Cousteau in the Bahamas. A National Geographic gig is her Holy Grail.
“I love that, and then I love this,” she says, taking a break during New York Fashion Week in September. “It is so different, and hard to decide. I really do enjoy both, and I hope that I can do both in my career.”
She’s certainly making inroads in the two areas. Anthropologie, the client whose backing spurred her cross-country move, has an earthy, ethnographic aesthetic that melds her passions. Since that week in 2012, she’s shot regularly for the company. Most recently, she photographed the band Lucius in Bushwick for Anthropologie’s Push Play project.
Hearing Sara talk about the moment when she captured the shot of the day in Bushwick, it’s easy to understand why Anthropologie keeps her number handy.
“I think I actually got some really good shots,” she tells me—a total understatement of the photo she pulls up on her iPhone.
In it, two identically dressed young women sit on a bench on either side of an elderly man, with an explosively vivid mural behind them. With its supersaturated color and cinematic quality, the photograph composes the kind of lush, evocative travel narrative Anthropologie is known for. It’s enough to make you woozy with wanderlust.
“When we got it, I immediately thought, This is something that looks like it would be in the catalog,” Sara says. “There was this guy named Fernando sitting outside the café where we were shooting. He was just sitting there, smoking a cigarette, very chill, and we had just finished one of the shots and were just walking back into the café to change. We all thought, Hey, let’s just get the girls next to him.”
When asked how she manages to get the aesthetic so spot-on, she demurs. “Maybe the simplest answer is that it’s just my style. You look for companies or people you match stylistically. I think that’s important. But you don’t always have to stay in that realm; you can go out.” Sara showed her flexibility and creativity in another recent shoot, for FD Luxe’s Hot Issue, that made use of Indian holi powders to futuristic, multichromatic effect.
Given the breadth of her career thus far, from shooting Anthropologie muses in Bushwick to sourcing holi powders in Manhattan to deep-sea diving with Cousteau, Sara regularly follows her own advice, making forays outside her comfort zone. We can’t wait to see where her sense of adventure takes her next.
Elyse Moody is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor who enjoys covering books, culture, travel, science, and nature. She has written for (published and forthcoming): ELLE, ELLE.com, Creative Nonfiction, The Daily Beast, BBC Travel, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Popular Mechanics, among other publications. Elyse has undergraduate degrees in English and journalism from Washington and Lee University in the Shenandoah Valley and a master’s in nonfiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. You can view her portfolio here and follow her on Twitter.
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