Imaging the meaning of home

It was a pair of slippers that got to Hailey Sadler. Fuzzy blue slip-ons, tucked next to a set of bunk beds in a cramped hotel room that had only recently been converted into makeshift housing for refugees in Georgia's capital city, Tbilisi.

The slippers' owner—an elderly Ukrainian man—had carefully positioned the shoes for easy access in the otherwise unfamiliar space now overstuffed with furniture and desperate people. The hostel-like room, once a hotel lobby, was now packed with bunk beds.

To Sadler, SAIS '22 (MIPP), a photo documentarian focused on home and displacement, it seemed like the man was attempting to create a tiny bit of order in his newly chaotic life.

She captured the scene from behind her camera lens in August 2022.

"This is what war looks like. It's not always how we picture it," she wrote in her journal the night after taking the photo. "It's the front lines, yes, but it's also the slippers of an elderly man laid out neatly beside his bed, the way he does at home. The way he has done it for years. Except now it is in a strange hotel, in a new country, surrounded by strangers."

Reminding people of their shared humanity is at the core of Sadler's work, particularly with the Home Collective, an ongoing multimedia project she co-founded during the pandemic with documentary filmmaker Darian Woehr. Grounded in the women's friendship and shared interests, it focuses on people's relationship with home and often involves collaborations with artists, activists, and academics.

Their work shines a spotlight on traumatic situations in which people are experiencing profound loss owing to conflict or other calamities, but Sadler says the key is to find ways that anyone can connect with these experiences.

"I'm so interested in the psychological impacts of conflict, and you see so many similarities across cultures and contexts," Sadler explains. "I think the more you engage with different experiences, the more you see those commonalities."

Sadler's career has exposed her to communities around the world. She worked in Washington, D.C., as a Capitol Hill staffer for five years before she turned to visual storytelling. But both chapters of her career have focused on understanding conflict, trauma, and identity—first from a policy perspective and now as a photo documentarian. In some of her most recent visual works, she's focused on stories of home and loss, including the repercussions of the Ukraine war, Mexican migrants caught in the limbo of U.S. immigration policies, and refugee Yazidi women who had been targeted by the Islamic State group in northern Iraq. Along the way, she's gained attention and financial support from Getty Images and Adobe, and her work has appeared in The New York Times and on CNN and PBS NewsHour.

C ertain elements of the Home Collective were bouncing around in Sadler's and Woehr's brains when they met right before the pandemic as members of a D.C.-area mentoring program for female photojournalists. The women immediately hit it off. Yet their Home Collective didn't coalesce until a phone conversation they had while isolating at their respective childhood homes.

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Woehr, who had been on staff at The Washington Post as a video journalist until January 2020, had focused more on the idea of home relating to land rights and the environment, while Sadler concentrated on conflict and displacement. But in that phone call they talked about how they finally had more time to do passion projects. They quickly came up with the idea to document how everyone's relationships with home had shifted owing to isolation.

They first posted on Instagram, asking people to tell them about their experiences of home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The response was overwhelming. "Just this question about home had opened up this flood of engagement, so that opened up both of our eyes," Sadler says.

People from 26 countries sent voice messages with expansive tales of their experiences as immigrants, of surviving domestic violence, of being refugees.

One particularly powerful message was left by an American woman named Sarah. It focused on her mental health during the pandemic, noting that, for her, home was her mind and she didn't feel safe there. "I feel trapped, almost, in my own mental states," Sarah explained in the message.

Sadler and Woehr decided to pair some of the voice messages with photos and footage they'd shot around their own homes and communities while they were self-isolating. A portion of that project was published in The Washington Post, and a fuller version was posted on the Home Collective website.

In 2021, Sadler and Woehr next published a visual, text, and video collaboration in the Post about how, for Navajo, crowded multigenerational homes have always been a way of life and culture, but the pandemic threatened that future. The virus, they wrote, had hit Native communities far harder than any other group in the United States, with more than double the hospitalization rates of white communities and two times the death rates.

The following year the National Geographic Society designated both women National Geographic Explorers, a recognition that came with financial backing and access to a community of storytellers and scientists, including illustrious figures like Jane Goodall.

With that recognition, the Home Collective was now firmly established as the touchstone for their future collaborations.

Despite Sadler's overarching professional focus on exploring the concept of home, for much of 2024 she hasn't had one herself. "It's been a bit of an unsettled season," she explains on a sunny March afternoon at one of her favorite spots in Washington, D.C., a cozy Ethiopian café dotted with a hodgepodge of global art on the walls and a loud coffee roaster jammed against one of its tables.

She is so often traveling for work, she explains, that in October 2023 she decided not to renew her D.C. lease and instead has been couch surfing with friends or staying in an Airbnb when she happens to be back in town between assignments.

After about seven months in this transient state, in May 2024 she'll once again have a home base after she and her fiancée get married and move in together, she says. Still, life's messiness can provide room for growth, she says. Sadler grew up in eastern Virginia, with no concept that photojournalism could be a career. She informally became her family's photo documentarian and garnered some public recognition for her images as well, her older sister, Brittany Sadler Berky, says. "She would always have her camera with her—one of those with a little wristband, well before our cameras were on our phones."

Sadler, the second eldest of five, graduated early from Thomas Edison State University, where she studied political science and international relations. She quickly landed a job on Capitol Hill working as a communications assistant for a Virginia legislator. At the time, she was only 20.

Her Hill jobs were eye-opening, she says, but after five years of working in policy and communications for lawmakers serving on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, she still felt like something was missing. She didn't have much face time with people or the ability to help them directly, she says, "and it felt like I just really valued the lived experience of people." So, after much consternation and legwork building relationships for future work in photography, she quit.

About two weeks later she was on a plane bound for Afghanistan, ready to briefly embed with a military unit as a freelance photojournalist. She'd snagged the opportunity through her work contacts and hoped that the time in Kabul and Helmand province in November 2017 would be clarifying and help her decide whether photojournalism might be the right path for her.

"It was very intense. I don't recommend this to younger journalists," she says, laughing. "An embed can only teach you so much, but I think it taught me that I wanted to approach this new era of work from a much more humanitarian side rather than military side," she says.

When she returned from her embed that winter, she kept one foot in each world—taking on consultancy work doing speechwriting in D.C., for example, yet also accepting jobs with nonprofits to visually document scenes in Iraq, Bangladesh, and elsewhere that might be used in their outreach materials or articles. She describes that time as a "messy gap year."

Finding ways to turn her photography into a steady career initially proved challenging.

She cobbled together work where she could, despite no formal training. "People were telling me it's not a viable career path. I had a period of extreme questioning of myself and what I am doing," she says.

Yet she shot photos constantly, did a lot of reading on her new profession, listened to podcasts, and watched online courses and interviews from some of the photographers she most admired, she says.

Bit by bit, her confidence grew, and though it was a hustle to get work, she felt that she'd made the right decision to focus on her photography career.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Sadler was still at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. But she felt that this was such a pivotal moment in history that she needed to document it. This was what she was passionate about—exploring people's evolving relationships with home and loss. Yet she couldn't leave for long; she needed to make it back by midterms in March.

Nora Bensahel, who co-taught the class she was taking on U.S. strategy and the future of war, was one of the professors who most supported Sadler's choice to go to Ukraine, and Bensahel still remembers her immediate reaction when she was approached about it.

She told Sadler, "There is nothing more important you can do right now than helping the Ukrainians in any way you can, and going and documenting what's happening is as vital as helping on the battlefield—getting that perspective out of Ukraine so people know what's going on."

Sadler traveled to the Polish-Ukrainian border and then onward to Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, somehow managing to return home in time for midterms.

In some of her Ukraine work from that period, Sadler focused on a pregnant 29-year-old mother who had fled across the border, alone, with her six children. The woman had decided to bring her kids to safety, leaving her husband behind since men couldn't cross the border at that time.

"She wasn't sure if she would see her husband again, and just sitting with her, I think that's why I ended up calling the [Ukraine] project the Personal Wars," because so many people had these personal crises that they were navigating, Sadler says. "To sit in that moment with someone is so heavy. You are overwhelmed with their resilience at that moment."

In another scene from that winter, Sadler captured a moment where a man on a train headed off to the front lines. His girlfriend and sister are shown reaching up their hands to touch the window—an attempt to connect for as long as possible even through the glass.

Beyond what's visible in the shot, similar scenes were playing out all around them. Families and friends all handled this moment of grief differently—some crying and clinging to each other, others joking, some putting a brave face on for the moment. "To see that over and over again was haunting," Sadler says.

It's an honor when someone opens themselves up to you and to witness people's lives and sometimes to put a face on historical moments, Sadler says. Yet it's also intense for the person behind the camera. Sadler's been known to cry on planes.

Lately, Sadler and Woehr have been exploring how the Warao, a community of Indigenous Venezuelans who have been displaced and are living in Brazil, pass on to younger generations memories of home, identity, and culture. Warao grandmothers, they've found, do essential storytelling work while engaging in traditional activities like teaching their grandchildren weaving. They come from a "very water-based culture," Sadler says, "and now they're living in refugee camps with all the noise and chaos and all the crowdedness."

In one scene that struck Sadler, an older woman named Maria Ceteno made boats out of leaves with her granddaughter Marucha.

As they worked, Ceteno mentioned how growing up in Venezuela, she and her community would get around on boats.

"It's organic storytelling using what is around them to link their memories to their native homeland," Sadler says. In many cases, she explains, "the grandmothers teach their grandchildren the traditional weaving and create a beautiful space for shared moments" as well.

Brittany Sadler Berky, who is currently serving as an assistant attorney general in Virginia, says she's always admired her sister's drive. "She has a very strong personal North Star. She just knows who she is so deeply and how she wants to impact the world which I think is unusual." As a big sister, however, Brittany adds, she gets nervous when Hailey takes on assignments in far-flung, risky locales and wants her little sister to take care of herself.

Hailey Sadler says she's working on it, and part of taking care of herself has meant trying to bring reminders of home on her assignments.

When she was starting out in this career, little aspects of home provided small comforts: the cheap canvas camera bag that she used when she was still a kid, for example. But, eventually, the bag broke. Her favorite jacket traveled around the world with her too, but eventually grew impractical for work assignments—"too thin"— and it developed holes. It was retired to the back of her closet.

"I've tried to be more conscious about creating good spaces for myself amid this work and travel," Sadler says. "I've not always been good about that, and a lot of times you're really under stress," when doing this work, she says. Now, she tries to bring a tiny candle with her on each assignment so that she can have a small light and familiar smell at the end of the day. The scent, she says, doesn't really matter.

Home is about far more than a location. It's about one's identity, a sense of calm, and the elements that are inextricably linked to define oneself.

"For many people it's about ancestors or family or native land. Home speaks to that broader identity for ourselves, whether that is a place, a person, or a memory of whatever it is," Sadler says. "It can be different for so many people across cultures."

For some people, however, it's mostly about the physical structure of home—and losing it is difficult to put into words.

"I think forced removal from home is so powerful and traumatic because it's a forced disconnection from that place and space that's so much of a part of who we are," Sadler says. That's why some policy leaders believe that systematic destruction of people's homes should be a war crime, she says.

In the narrative poem The Odyssey, Homer's lead character attempts to reach home, a place where loved ones and mental peace would be waiting—or at least that's what he expects. For many of the people Sadler sees through her camera lens, their idea of home is similarly aspirational, and the journey ahead may seem uncertain. Displaced from their homes because of conflict, they do not truly know what they might return to—or if they can ever make it back. That means they'll need to rewrite for themselves what home is or consider what elements of home they bring with them.

Being in a photograph can be a "big ask" for some people, especially in a difficult moment of their lives, Sadler says. "Everywhere is different. Everyone is different," she says, but to get the needed shot, "I think it's about being honest and open about why you're doing what you're doing," she says, and that "requires having a strong sense of why you are there."

Though it can be challenging or even risky for a photographer to take certain photos, she says, the real danger comes for the people being photographed. Photos of someone speaking out against a government can put people—or their families—at risk, and Sadler says she's constantly thinking about that need to protect the people, balancing the risks and benefits for those on the other side of her lens.

The Home Collective team now explores the unseen world with a new collaborative project centered around post-traumatic dreaming.

Sadler says they aim to explore how memories of home reappear in the dream state for people who have been displaced by conflict. The project, still in its early stages, will be a multi­media effort, and they expect to work with scientists to learn about the sleep science behind post-traumatic dreaming as well.

In dreams, anything may be possible, including returning to a home that may no longer exist.