Black and white portrait of a woman with tattoos on her hands and arms, short dark hair, and multiple rings. She is making a playful face with her fingers around her eyes.

Hi, Iā€™m Sarah.

I picked up a camera in my 30s after burning out in a job I'd convinced myself I should want. I was exhausted and doing that thing where you wonder if quietly unhappy is just what adulthood feels like. Photography changed everything - not because I knew what I was doing, but because I couldn't stop. I was immediately obsessed. I took a lighting class. I read every book I could find. I showed up in the orbits of photographers I admired and asked questions until they answered. There was no formal program, no clear path. Just obsession and the willingness to figure it out. I practiced and practiced some more and figured it out as I went.

Within a year and a half I had a business I hadn't planned on building. That was 14 years ago.

I named it Portraits To The People because I wanted photography to feel like it belonged to everyone. Over the years I've photographed tech CEOs and camera-shy therapists, corporate teams and personal branding clients, Pride campaigns and lots of folks for their online dating profiles. The thread running through all of it: I specialize in people who hate being photographed. I'm obsessed with the end of the session. When the nerves are gone and someone looks at their photos and says oh ā€” that quiet surprise of being seen clearly, maybe for the first time. A good photo isn't just documentation. It's permission to take up space, to be seen, to exist in the record. I think everyone deserves that. Especially the people who've spent years avoiding it.

In 2014 I launched The Identity Project - documenting the words LGBTQ+ people use to describe their gender and sexuality. It took me across the US and internationally to Taiwan and St. Petersburg, Russia, photographing queer people in places where visibility ranges from celebrated to dangerous. Images from that project ended up on Smirnoff's limited-edition Pride bottles, and eventually covered an entire NYC subway station as part of Harry's Pride campaign. I didn't set out to do any of that. I just started photographing people and followed where it led.

In 2025, I rented my own studio in Sausalito called In Community Photography Studio - after many many years of shared spaces and my garage. It's the first place that's fully mine, and it changed what I thought was possible.

I've also started writing publicly on Substack about something I find genuinely complicated: I use AI tools in my work, and I have real concerns about how those tools were built. I don't have clean answers. But I think showing up honestly to hard questions matters more than pretending you've figured it all out. I post weekly pieces on Field Notes from the Intersection of AI & Photography if you want to follow along.

If you've made it to the end of this page, you already know more about me than most people do before they hire a photographer. So let's skip the part where we're strangers. I'd love to hear from you.

Contact Info:

šŸ“§ sarahderagon@gmail.com

šŸ“ø Instagram: @sarahderagon

šŸ’¼ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahderagon

āœļø Substack: https://sarahderagon.substack.com

Based in the Bay Area ā€¢ Studio in Sausalito

LOVES to Travel