SAW Photography

About SAW

Born in D.C. and grown in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maine, and New Mexico, Sarah Anne Wharton's photographic experience began as a ten-year-old with a 110-film format camera: a sleek, black tube, half the size of a sandwich. She brought it with her everywhere, congratulating herself on a solid choice of future career when she caught two chipmunks eating nuts in one frame. From then on, traveling from state to state, country to country, and person to person, SAW has kept at least one camera strapped around her neck.

She is curious and exuberant, and loves to bake, whistle, and photograph your face.

Sarah currently works, lives, and plays between rural central Pennsylvania and urban Brooklyn, New York, but travels often and everywhere. Come visit and you can meet her coyote mutt puppy, Boon, and listen to the constant rain spatter of the PA mountains from her deck.

Celebration of Simplicity

6/13/2013

Written this morning to a friend – on another rain day – while countless thousands of drops fell and puddled over breakfast.

There is something about the rain that makes it easy to prattle to you, something about the steady, falling drips that lead me to stillness and contemplation – a pause from a quiet breakfast of coffee, grapefruit, and toast with cream cheese.

They are simple things – these splats on windows and milk in coffee and sweet, pink sections on a shiny teaspoon – but I realize more and more and more and MORE that they are what life is about. So small, so inexpensive, so unimportant; yet they mean everything to me, are so big, are so rich, are so significant.

Simplicity is key in living a happy life, I’m sure of it. It is beautiful and efficient and challenging and delightful, but so hard to accomplish. And there are a great many glittering distractions, and time-wasters, and hole-fillers that still leave you empty.

I hope that if – on a fantastical, wild off-chance – I come into extravagant hordes of money, I will give much of it away, save some of it, and spend the rest on the dear, simple things that are solid, timeless, and that burrow deep: guitar melodies, matches for campfires, knitted sweaters, ripe avocados for guacamole to feed friends below high rooftops, gas for trips to mountains and lakes, and – one day – a stretch of openness to put a house and make a home, small in size but huge in heart.