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Remembering Sara Terry
6 November 2025
Sara Terry, who documented the effects of war in places like Bosnia and Sierra Leone, died at her home in Los Angeles on Oct. 13 at the age of 70.
The younger of two children, Terry was born in Lansing, Mich., but grew up in San Pedro, Calif. Her father LeGrand was an aerospace engineer and her mother Margaret managed their home.
Terry graduated from California State University, Long Beach, in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, she worked as a print reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. She was an author of "Children in Darkness," a 1987 series of articles for The Monitor which described the exploitation of children as soldiers and laborers around the world.
After her years at The Monitor, she was a freelance writer for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone and other publications.
By then, though, she had found a more powerful way to tell stories.
"I lost my faith in words in the mid-90s and I picked up a camera," she said in a 2013 talk. "I moved from being a strict journalist to being a storyteller."
But her training in journalism informed her photography. She would approach a subject not with her finger on the shutter but listening to their story. It was as if her first instinct was for protecting people.
Photographer Ed Kashi said her work was about “going deep, making sure she was retaining the dignity of her subject.”
"When she would go visit these people, she listened to them," the photographer Maggie Steber said. "Sometimes we go in with an agenda. She let them tell her their story, and she would just listen. She got very deep because of that."
Her war photography, consequently, wasn't conflict photography. It was about the aftermath of war, the cost of war on the people war had visited.
"Just because the guns stop doesn't mean there's peace," she said in a TEDx talk in 2013, a year after she won a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2007 she founded the Aftermath Project, a nonprofit that awards grants to photographers, inspired by her belief that "war is only half the story."
Terry's work has been exhibited at the United Nations and the Fotomuseum Antwerp in Belgium, among other places, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
She also produced documentary films, including Fambul Tok in 2011, about the postwar reconciliation process in Sierra Leone and A Decent Home in 2021, showing what she called "the wealth gap through mobile home parks and the wealthy investors buying them up."
She is survived by her brother Tim.