What happens to an image once it is separated from its claim to truth?
This question quietly underpins Sara Sahores’ latest series of compelling screenprints. Typically known for her polaroid cityscapes, these begin not with a camera in the artist’s hand, but with livestream surveillance feeds scattered across the globe.
The Impossible Places is a photographic series made from live webcam screenshots – airports, highways, an erupting volcano glimpsed from the other side of the planet – but rather than interrogating the surveillance apparatus, the artist sidesteps it entirely. Displayed between draping yellow linen in Sara’s signature metal frames, there is something inherently dark and sinister about surveillance, making it more striking when transformed into these vibrant screenprints.
Surveillance images, understood as objective truth and often used as criminal evidence, are subverted and reappropriated here as spaces for beauty and uncertainty. There’s a moment in our conversation where Sara admits she often can’t remember where her source images come from. “The most I can tell you is it’s either in Europe or North America,” she says of her piece Blue Hour (cover image). For work rooted in surveillance footage, forgetting feels almost radical.
What Sara wants instead is ambiguity. “I like when I look at something to not understand it completely.” The screen-printing process becomes her tool for achieving this. By enlarging the images, softening their digital edges and introducing unpredictable colour shifts through pressure and layering, she distances them from their origins. A ski slope at dusk becomes Sunrise. The title reflects what she feels looking at it, not where the camera was mounted.
Photography typically demands answers: who, where, when. Sara’s work denies them. “The idea is to be more in your imagination of what the photo is rather than trying to discover where it is.” Even the separations of cyan, magenta and yellow, sometimes deliberately omitting black, transform documentary footage into something closer to memory. Colours drift; details dissolve. The image becomes a question rather than evidence.
What strikes me most is how the process preserves the excitement of the original moment. Unlike archival material, these screenshots are taken live. Discovering an erupting volcano on a webcam gave Sara “the excitement as if I was seeing it in person.” That immediacy remains once translated onto ink and paper. These works suggest contemporary vision is defined not solely by surveillance, but by the possibility of transforming documentation into storytelling.
In a culture saturated with images designed for total visibility, anxious about photographic truth, this work recovers mystery and permission to wonder. Sara’s screen printing returns us to speculation, allowing perception to drift from recognition towards reverie. Standing before these prints, you stop asking what is this? and start imagining what it could be. The mistakes, she tells me, sometimes turn out gold. As a result, what began as surveillance ends, unexpectedly, as poetry.
Follow Sara Sahores on Instagram
www.sarasahores.com
Words: Celeste Graham
All photos courtesy of Sara Sahores