SARA LEITH-TANOUS

Sara Leith-Tanous has spent four decades making small, introspective gelatin silver prints — photographs that ask viewers to slow down, look closely, and discover connections they might otherwise miss.

Working in the darkroom tradition, she is drawn to the quiet and the fleeting: rushing water and light-filled foliage, the sensuality of animals in motion, the tenderness of hands, the gravity of places where loss has settled. Her subjects range across the human and animal worlds, between intimate portraits and open landscapes, between the ordinary moment and the one that stops time. What unites them is a felt sense of connection — to other living things, to cycles of nature, to the persistence of love in the face of impermanence.

Her work has always moved between the personal and the universal. Early series like What We Mean When We Talk About Love and In the Silence Beyond Words used landscape and portraiture to hold grief and continuity together in a single frame. Her most recent monograph, An Elephant on My Shoulder and Other Attachments, draws on photographs made between 2021 and 2025 across California, East Africa, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, Yorkshire, and Maui — united not by geography but by the photographer's attention to kinship in unlikely places.

In an era that celebrates large-scale digital work and concept-driven imagery, Leith-Tanous continues to find meaning in the alchemical processes of the darkroom — the tension of watching a print emerge in the developer tray, affirming or failing to affirm a moment now lost to time. Like poems, her images require solitude, introspection, and presence. They reward those willing to pause.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Oakland Museum of California
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
City of Seattle Water Department