Sara Terry

2008 Honoree / Humanitarian Award

A former staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and magazine freelance writer, SARA TERRY, made a mid-career transition into photojournalism and documentary photography in the late 1990s. Her long-term project about the aftermath of war in Bosnia — “Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace” — was published in September 2005 by Channel Photographics and was named as one of the best photo books of the year by Photo District News.

Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines in the United States, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Bosnia, and Japan. Her photos have also been widely exhibited, at such venues as the United Nations, the Moving Walls exhibition at the Open Society Institute in New York, the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, and the Leica Gallery in Solms, Germany. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in many private collections.

In 2005, she received a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship for her work in Bosnia. She is currently working on an aftermath project in Africa, “Forgiveness and Conflict: Lessons from Africa,” which explores traditional practices of truth-telling and forgiveness in post-conflict African countries.

Her long-term project in Bosnia – and her conviction that war is only half the story – led her to start a non-profit grant program, The Aftermath Project, www.theaftermathproject.org, which helps photographers cover the aftermath of war and other conflicts.

The Aftermath Project is committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace.

The Project recognizes the overarching role the media plays in helping set policy debate about — and public awareness of — critical issues of peace and security. It also recognizes that in focusing on the “news” of conflict with little attention paid to its aftermath, the media has failed to fully represent the true cost of war and the real price of peace.

The Aftermath Project is founded on the conviction that war is only half the story – that the end of war does not mean peace, or security; it is simply the end of death and destruction. Every war, every conflict, includes a chapter that almost always goes untold – the story of the aftermath, which day by day becomes the prologue of the future. Few, if any, resources are available to photographers who want to cover these stories and few, if any, outlets exist for those stories even if photographers can find a way to produce them.

These are the stories the Aftermath Project seeks to tell and to magnify through its yearly grant competition, open to photographers worldwide who are covering the aftermath of conflict, at local, regional or international levels. And through partnerships with universities, photography institutions and non-profit organizations, the Project seeks to help broaden the public’s understanding of the true cost of war— and the real price of peace — through international traveling exhibitions and educational outreach in communities and schools.

In May, 2008, the Aftermath Project’s first publication was released, a joint partnership with Mets and Schilt (Amsterdam) and Aperture (New York). “War is Only Half the Story, Volume One,” features the work of grant winners Jim Goldberg and Wolf Boewig and finalists from the Aftermath Project’s first year of grant-making in 2007.