Sara Naomi Lewkowicz - The Visual Journalist

Sara Lewkowicz is a native New Yorker pursuing a master's degree in visual communication from Ohio University in Athens. She received her bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently studying in London while flying back to America to keep shooting her domestic violence work. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers. She has won several grants and awards, including the 2013 Alexia Student Grant, first place in contemporary issues in World Press Photo and the 2013 Ville de Perpignan Remi Ochlik Award, and she has been named the 2013 College Photographer of the Year by CPOY. Other awards an honors have included being recognized by the Sony World Photography Organization. When she is not taking pictures, she enjoys yoga, painting her nails, watching films and reading.­

Sara Lewkowicz is one of the best up and coming photographers of my generation. Her work is different class to people of the same age. I first came across her work when I was looking through protographers her document domestic violence. Domestic violence is a largely invisible crime. We usually only hear it muffled through walls, and we usually only see it manifested in the faded yellow and purple bruises of a woman who “walked into a wall” or “fell down the stairs.” It is rarely limited to one event, and it rarely stops. Sara Lewkowicz’s project, “Shane and Maggie,” seeks to portray domestic abuse as a process, as opposed to a single incident, examining how a pattern of abuse develops and eventually crests, as well as its short- and long-term effects on victims, their families, and their abusers. 

Closer To Heaven



Sara Lewkowicz’s domestic violence project is the most talked about in her series of work but she has other amazing ongoing projects that are just as good if not better but haven’t got the recognition. “Closer to heaven” focuses on the troubled life of Alex a stripper in America, struggling to pay bills and find any excuse to wake up everyday. It really is a great body of work that doesn’t need any text to accompany the images as you get every piece of information you need from each image. Looking at the whole series together you get a real sense of a journey unfolding in front of you but ultimately leaves you asking the question did “alex” turn her life around or carry on the way it was? I like the idea of the audience wanting more which is how the series leaves me. I want to know how this Alex is getting on, which is a hard feet to accomplish in such a short series of prints.