About Michele Sauer

 

 

I am a writer, documentarian, and professional photographer whose work centers on family history, human development, and the quiet forces that shape identity across generations.

 

My intellectual formation began with a liberal arts education at Southern Seminary in Buena Vista, Virginia, an all-women’s college, where I studied music history and completed my four years of French. These studies trained my ear for rhythm, nuance, and cultural meaning, and instilled a lasting sensitivity to how language, sound, and art carry memory and identity through time. Although I no longer actively use French, the language remains foundational to how I hear tone, phrasing, and meaning in written expression.

 

I later graduated from Washington Business School and spent many years working in roles involving legal documentation and research. That professional chapter sharpened my respect for accuracy, evidence, and clear narrative, which are skills that remain central to my work as a documentarian.

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I am also a graduate of the New York Institute of Photography, where I completed extensive professional coursework and earned a certificate in photography. My training emphasized technical mastery, ethical representation, and documentary intent. Photography, for me, is not simply aesthetic; it is a method of observation, and a way of witnessing human relationships, roles, and transitions with care and integrity.

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In 2019, during a period of focused study and peak health, I returned to formal academic work in psychology and writing, producing analytical and research-based papers on human behavior, developmental theory, ethics, and the relationship between experience and personality. During this same period, I studied songwriting and piano, integrating musical structure and lyrical discipline into my approach to writing. Songwriting, in particular, shaped how I learned to work with cadence, restraint, and repetition, using rhythm as a way of carrying meaning, much like poetry shaped by musical form.

 

Across this work, one enduring question emerged and has guided me ever since:

 

Why do people become who they become?

 

My interests lie particularly in family systems, birth order, attachment, responsibility, and the ways early roles shape adult identity and behavior across the lifespan. I am less interested in diagnosis than in understanding formation—how meaning, duty, love, and expectation quietly shape a life.

 

In parallel with my writing and photographic work, I have pursued foundational training in drawing through Drawing Academy, further refining my attention to proportion, gesture, and structure. These practices reinforce a disciplined way of seeing, rooted in patience, observation, and respect for form.

 

My long-form memoir, Woven with Love, reflects this same orientation. While grounded in personal and family history, it is fundamentally a work of observation, an exploration of my lifelong memories, behavior, belief, and legacy, and of how lives are shaped through relationship and time.

 

Today, my work integrates documentary photography, analytical writing, and family history research. Through images and essays, I seek to preserve not only how families looked, but how they lived, loved, adapted, endured, and passed meaning forward.

 

This website serves as a home for that work:

photography as witness,

writing as interpretation,

and family history as a form of stewardship.

 

I believe that understanding our stories, clearly and honestly, is one of the most meaningful gifts we can leave to those who come after us.