The Center for Photographic Art is pleased to present Easy Days, a solo exhibition of photographs by Sage Sohier.
Organized in collaboration with Nazraeli Press on the occasion of the artist’s newest monograph, the show brings together images from Americans Seen, Passing Time, and Easy Days (Nazraeli, 2025).
Between 1979 and 1986, while living in Boston as a young photographer, Sohier began photographing people in their neighborhoods. In that pre-digital era, children and teenagers often spent long afternoons outside, and the streets became stages for spontaneous gatherings. Her own childhood afternoons, spent inventing small theatrical productions with neighborhood children, shaped her vision of play as a form of performance.
Over seven years she explored Boston’s working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, captivated by triple-deckers, porches, clotheslines, and empty lots that became natural backdrops for layered portraits. On hot summer days she sought out beach towns, while road trips took her to small towns in Pennsylvania, mining communities in West Virginia, and Mormon enclaves in Utah and Idaho. In the cold Boston winters, she traveled south to Florida and Louisiana.
Her ambition was to portray contemporary America by photographing people in their own environments. She sought out complex portraits, often by asking strangers to let her photograph them, working quickly before moments disappeared. Although asking permission sometimes shifted the dynamic, staying longer often revealed unexpected truths. The act of intruding into people’s private lives was never easy, but her enthusiasm usually encouraged subjects to relax and be themselves.
During the pandemic, Sohier revisited her archive of negatives and contact sheets from the 1980s and discovered many photographs she had never printed. This process inspired two recent publications with Nazraeli Press, Passing Time and Easy Days.
Looking back, she has often wished she had kept notes about the people she met and the conversations she had. Even so, the memories remain vivid. Photography allowed her to meet people from diverse backgrounds, to wander, and to be curious about the world. She remains grateful to those who let her photograph them, not only for their openness but also for how those encounters shaped and enriched her life.