A portrait of love and loss in America today

From the age of 15, Kate Sterlin found sanctuary in the promise of photography. The camera could stop time and preserve memories, providing a sense of stability amidst her father’s illness and her mother’s obsessive moving habits.

Her sensitivity matched by her energy, Sterlin did the work, amassing a majestic archive of the worlds she has inhabited over the past 30 years. It was only in 2020, when the world came to a stop that she found the time needed to return to her archive and reflect.

“Time suddenly seemed very precious and also endless, so I started looking through my negatives,” Sterlin says. ​“The most remarkable thing was seeing who I was at age 15, 25, 35, and so on; not only what I decided to frame but what I overlooked, how my lens has changed, and how time looks from here.”

The photographs unlocked memories buried in the recesses of the past, inspiring Sterlin to call them back and render them with a raw and tender integrity born of devotion and love. ​“I started writing, letting the stories find their way to the page,” she says. ​“I wasn’t really sure what it was going to be but I knew I wanted to make a book, an artefact to hold.”

“It was such an intensely distilled emotional time between the shuttering from a virus and marching in the streets with the BLM movement and discussing race with everyone without apology. It felt like an important moment to make something honest and real and I just thought ok, let me dig in and see what’s really there.”

From that desire, Sterlin began to create her first monograph, Still Life: Photographs & Love Stories (Anthology Editions), an intimate visual memoir of family, kinship, and community. She pairs poetic scenes with poignant prose that flows like scenes from a dream that are at once mysterious and familiar.

“Images are memory’s faithful custodians,” writes actress Tessa Thompson, Sterlin’s stepdaughter, in the book’s afterword. ​“They preserve the ephemeral and fragile fragments of our existence. But images do more than guard memory: they give us portals into understanding the past so that we may live in a more unfettered, loving present.”

In Sterlin’s hands, time as a linear force ceases to exist and is replaced by the simultaneity of experience. ​“We exist in a constant state of fluidity and fragmentation,” she says. ​“We live in the past, barely the present and a lot in the future. We are always preparing for loss and denying it’s ever going to happen.”

For Sterlin, the journey to create Still Life would become part of the story itself. ​“The whole time I was making this book exploring grief, love and loss, I didn’t know I was about to lose my mother,” she says. ​“But then I thought maybe making this book was a way to prepare for her death — to have something to hold that I made out of love and sadness for when she’s gone.”

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.