Author: Andie Freeman
Header image: Sarah Jones Decker. Photo credit: Lauren Rutton, courtesy of Sarah Jones Decker.
The North Carolina Arts Council has been working with artists and arts organizations to find ways to recover and build their creative enterprises back stronger after the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in the fall of 2024. Our series Portraits in Resilience has been highlighting artists from the region to discover how they are responding. This month, we showcase Sarah Jones Decker of Marshall, a writer and photographer who has been documenting her community in the aftermath of the storm.
As a child, Sarah felt drawn to write. When she learned about photography, she realized the symbiotic relationship of the two media, and pursued them both. With a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Virginia Tech and a master’s in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Sarah had the skills to pursue her dream of telling stories in words and pictures. Sarah says, “I have always considered myself on the documentary side, constantly capturing the world around me no matter what I might be up to at that time.”
Like a lot of people who live in western North Carolina, Sarah is drawn to nature and being active outside. She has invested her love of nature in publications about the trails of the area. “I wrote the history and took photos of every shelter on the Appalachian Trail, and I wrote our local hiking guide, The Ridges of Madison County,” Sarah says. “My current work in progress is The 100 Classic Hikes of North Carolina, for Mountaineers Books.” Sarah is trail maintainer and sawyer with the Carolina Mountain Club and maintains a section of the Appalachian Trail north of Hot Springs. She and her husband have owned Root Bottom Farm in Marshall since 2011.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Sarah knew that her calling as a documentarian meant that she needed to capture the devastation of the landscape and the resilience of the residents as they cooperated to save their neighbors. Through the specialized technique of tintype1 photography, she set to work taking photos of the historic changes taking place. “I took a summer tintype class solely because I was interested in documenting our next Mermaid Parade in Marshall that way,” Sarah says. “After 30 years in the medium, a new challenge was exciting. Wet plate photography is a notoriously delicate and finicky medium. I never thought that less than five months later, I would build a makeshift darkroom in the back of my Subaru and shoot my beloved town after it was devastated by Helene. I had only practiced in my home darkroom twice before the storm.”
As she volunteered and helped her neighbors, she was reminded of a truth she already knew: community is much more than buildings; it’s the people you encounter in your daily life. “This project has connected me to so many new friends and given me the chance to spend more time with people I love,” she says. “After weeks of volunteering, it was an awesome experience to create art together. It’s a lot to ask someone who has lost so much to give you an hour of their time. I will cherish every single image and the magic we made together. It’s been my honor.” Each of Sarah’s images is unique, and has a warm nostalgic and atmospheric feel, bringing a humanity to the subject that is hard to describe.
As she considers the future, Sarah is hopeful for the region’s recovery. She is looking forward to a solo show of her Marshall tintypes at the Weizenblatt Gallery, on the Mars Hill University campus, in September. She is in her second year working on her next book cataloguing the 100 best hikes in North Carolina. “Getting paid to hike, write, and photograph is really a trifecta of things I love,” she tells us. “It has been a great experience to see so much of what this beautiful state has to offer, from the mountains to the coast.”
Reflecting on the experience of the past year, she says, “I’ve always made art, and I don’t see that changing. I had a lot of uncertainty for this project, but I went for It anyway. I think this experience reminds me to just keep doing the darn things—make the work and challenge yourself to get uncomfortable again.”
1 Tintypes are an early form of photography introduced in Paris in 1853 by Adolphe Alexandre Martin. Through a chemical process that creates a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal, a tintype creates an image that is a camera original. Unless otherwise fitted with a specific type of mirror, tintypes create a mirror image, reversed left to right from reality.