PROVISIONAL FACTS

Close

How I Formally Am:

Sarah Blesener is an educator, artist, and visual researcher interested in the complexity of human relationships and their visual representations. For the past decade, they have worked on investigative and long-form storytelling, with the belief that the people closest to the issues know what needs to be done to address them. They are interested in challenging the inherent power dynamics within the documentary form.

Alongside photographs, Sarah uses archival imagery, mixed media, poetry, and painting. In 2025, they co-created Enter/Exit, a project of methodologies, critiques, poetry and art outlining alternative ways of working with survivors.

Their long-form work is interested in themes of silence, speech, testimony, and trauma.

They co-founded Tacet Eye, an interdisciplinary educational community focused on alternative approaches to visual narratives, poetics, process and ethics. Sarah is also faculty at the International Center of Photography.

Click here for C.V.
Click here for Educator’s CV
Click here for visual journalism work
Click here for collaborative projects

CONTACT@SARAH-BLESENER.COM
+1 651 373 9709
PORTLAND, OREGON
@SARAHBLESENER

How I Question the Work:

How communicable is experience?

How do we relate to the unspeakable?

What is the difference between the unsaid vs the unsayable?

How do speaking and silence function as political acts?

What are the impediments to speech?

What alternative ways of communicating open up when language fails?

How does the social transformation of society restructure the inner consciousness of the individual?

Who is trusted to be a reliable narrator of their own story?

Can the dreamscape be a place of political resistance?

How willing are we to disclose our inner life?

What counts as evidence?

What are we really doing when we testify? Is it about the speech act, the gesture, the listening? Does the function shift with the form - from the confessional booth, the court, the recovery room, the bedroom?

Who gets to hold proof?

What does it mean to have knowledge that others value?

Who do we turn to and why?

How I Think About the Work:

Category 1: Mistakes/failures/accidents/crisis

Category 2: Sound and silence

Category 3: Codes, color, symbols!, the dream

Category 4: Interior landscapes

Category 5: Translation and reverberation

Category 6: Expressions of divine feeling

Category 7: Sleepwalking