[citation needed] After completing her education in San Francisco, Sachs returned to her hometown of Memphis in 1989 to shoot Sermons and Sacred Pictures.
It is in this style that she has produced five pieces (Which Way Is East, The House of Drafts, Investigation of a Flame, States of Unbelonging and The Last Happy Day) grouped together as the I Am Not A War Photographer series.
Commissioned in 2008 by the New York Public Library, Lynne Sachs ventured into the realm of online installations with the web piece Abecedarium NYC.
The interactive project is an online alphabet of obscure words represented by short films made by Sachs and other collaborators such as filmmakers Barbara Hammer, David Gatten and George Kuchar.
In addition to this, the project is meant to stand as an ongoing exploration through participatory blog threads and collaboration with other online media forums[3] open to the public.
The piece is a meditation on some of the most prolific New York-based artists of the 1980s and 1990s who died of AIDS in this city, including Ethyl Eichelberger, David Wojnarowicz and Reynaldo Arenas.
In 2013, Sachs completed the hybrid-documentary Your Day is My Night which features residents of a New York City Chinatown shift-bed apartment sharing their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Stuart Klawans of The Nation wrote, the film is "a strikingly handsome, meditative work: a mixture of reportage, dreams, memories and playacting, which immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street.
[5] From 2014-2017, Sachs collaborated with playwright Lizzie Olesker on a series of site-specific, live performances titled Every Fold Matters, which examined the charged, intimate space of the neighborhood laundromat and the people who work there.
[6] Over a two-year period of research and interviews with NYC laundry workers, Sachs and Olesker worked with performers Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and Tony Torn in their hybrid-doc The Washing Society (2018).