404 | Bridget

Sarah Chen is a documentary and street photographer working between New York and Tokyo. Her practice centres on the unseen rituals of urban life — the pause before the crowd, the gesture that no one notices, the ordinary made strange by attention.

Trained at the International Center of Photography in New York, Sarah spent five years embedded in Tokyo’s Yanesen district, producing her acclaimed series Still Moving — a study of the neighbourhood’s last traditional craftspeople navigating a city in constant reinvention.

Her work has been described as ‘quiet but insistent’. She shoots primarily on medium format film, favouring the Mamiya RZ67 for its unforgiving clarity. She is interested in what the photograph cannot say as much as what it can.

Sarah’s images have been exhibited at the ICP, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and featured in Aperture, Foam, and The British Journal of Photography. She is currently working on a long-term project documenting the Lower East Side’s shifting communities.