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Cristi Sara

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Cristi Sara

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FRILL STUDIO

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Cristi is an English photographer and visual artist whose work is rooted in memory, impermanence, and the raw, tactile beauty of everyday life. Working primarily with women and mothers, she creates deeply personal imagery with strong conceptual ideas across both analogue and digital mediums. With a particular passion for traditional film photography, Cristi favours building visual narratives on analogue mediums.

Her relationship with photography began long before she understood it as an art form. At six or seven years old, armed with her mother’s Kodak point-and-shoot camera, she photographed everything around her. One of her earliest projects was an entire roll of film dedicated to her beloved pet hamster, driven by an instinctive desire to preserve a life she knew had already passed. That impulse to hold onto fleeting moments has remained the foundation of her practice ever since.

As a child, Cristi documented the world with relentless curiosity: toys, flowers, garden ornaments, family pets, horses, her sister, and the small details that shaped her everyday life. Even then, she possessed an acute awareness of the fragility and transience of memory, using photography as a way to create permanence where none naturally exists.

Alongside photography, cinema became an equally profound influence. Summers spent watching films recorded onto VHS tapes and an enduring fascination with the work of Steven Spielberg sparked a lifelong curiosity about visual storytelling. After countless viewings of E.T., she became captivated not only by the stories themselves but by the mechanics of filmmaking, wondering how images could transport an audience so completely into another world.

That fascination guided many of her early decisions. At eleven, she chose her secondary school because it offered a media department, drawn by the opportunity to work with cameras. She later studied Photography at college, immersing herself in black and white film processing, darkroom printing, and traditional photographic techniques. Much of those years was spent in the darkroom, learning to slow down and embrace the tactile process of analogue image-making.

Cristi went on to study Film at university while working as a cinema projectionist during the industry’s transition from 35mm projection to digital cinema. Although the technology evolved, her strongest memories remain those of threading reels through the projection equipment, a ritual that deepened her appreciation for the physicality and craftsmanship of analogue media.

Today, Cristi is a mother of three based in England. She continues to photograph with the same sense of wonder that first compelled her to pick up a camera as a child. Her work seeks to honour ordinary moments before they disappear, exploring themes of connection, motherhood, identity, and memory. Whether working with film or digital processes, her images are driven by a lifelong desire to preserve what is fleeting and to celebrate the beauty found in the lives we are living now

© 2026 CRISTI SARA

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