Sage Sohier is an American photographer. She was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954 and grew up in Virginia. She is based in Boston. She has a B.A. from Harvard University. She has taught photography at Harvard University, Wellesley College and the Massachusetts College of Art. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the No Strings Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation.
She started photographing in the 1970s. Her teacher Tod Papageorge was a strong early influence. She always asks permission before she photographs someone.
Sohier has published nine monographs. Three books of her 1980s photographs were published by Nazraeli Press: Americans Seen (2017, remastered edition 2024), Passing Time (2023) and Easy Days (2025). The pictures in Americans Seen were made between 1979 and 1986 in working-class and ethnic neighborhoods in Boston and on summer road trips. Passing Time shows photographs from 1979 to 1985 that she found in her archive during the pandemic and had never printed.
Her other books include Peaceable Kingdom (Kehrer Verlag, 2021), Animals (Stanley/Barker, 2019), Witness to Beauty (Kehrer Verlag, 2016) and At Home With Themselves (Spotted Books, 2014).
Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.
