We recently connected with Sam Interrante and have shared our conversation below.
Sam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
Sometimes I feel like my story is a lot of the result of being in the right place at the right time. My journey began in 2013. I had just earned my fine arts degree from Millersville University, which was the same point at which I realized I should have probably minored in business. Oops haha. By that time and reflecting on having spent literally 18 of my then 23 years of life in some sort of school, I wanted to kinda just get on with things, I guess see how I would fare out in the world. So I was serving at a restaurant in Lancaster while picking up any weddings or really whatever work I could find. Like yes, I will shoot your wedding, yes I will shoot your family, your album cover, your newborn, your dog, you name it. I had a basic website and was posting pictures of everything on Facebook.
By the summer of that year a local team of wedding photographers were scouting for a new team member and found me online, or maybe through word of mouth. One of the benefits of living in a small town. It seemed like a dream come true at the time. That ended up only lasting for about four months, but I’m so thankful for that job because it also equipped me with enough of the basic business acumen to try to start my own thing. So I captured weddings primarily for the next two years. It was definitely humble beginnings. I sort of loved it, sort of hated it. I was fortunate to land so many cool couples. I honestly felt like I was always batting a thousand with my couples. But the nature of the job gave me paramount anxiety before almost every wedding I’d capture. That, and in general I was just realizing it wasn’t going to be my end-game. I think I wanted my weekends back too haha.
My propensity with shooting weddings was always slanted toward the people and the story. I think I just really like people in general. I realized that people also needed photos of themselves in plenty of other contexts so I started endeavoring into studio portraits and headshots. Around that same time, the then-studio manager of my previous job and a few other investors were starting a creative co-working space that had a photo studio. It was perfect timing again. The community, camaraderie, and general buzz of working along other creatives growing their businesses was really special. The founder became a really good friend and a sort of mentor in my life and my business. So I spent the next four years plugging away at that before moving into another shared studio across town where I’ve now been for the past three years. I’m still capturing portraits and headshots, and now helping other photographers get their craft and their aspiring businesses off the ground.
Every challenge and struggle along the way was necessary to move forward. I kind of just built the thing, one piece at a time, one failure at a time, one little win at a time. The more I learn, the more I feel like I’m just getting started. The single most important thing I am learning now and that anyone doing this must learn is to enjoy the process. So I don’t think there should be any “speeding up the process”. For me, that’s a sure fire way to be forever-delaying gratification until the next milestone and missing what is happening around me here and now. Though I’m by no means the poster child of this idyllic way that I’m talking haha. Admittedly, patience has never been my strong suit, so learning to love the process has probably been one of my greatest challenges and most important lessons.
Sam, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I guess I answered some of this already, but the short version is basically that I’m an artist first and a business owner second. Some people are more the opposite – business owners first, and using photography as their tool for making money. And a lot of them are really successful. I always marvel at their robust websites, steady flow of clientele, their marketing savvy, their bank accounts, the whole thing. But I’m more so just an artist with a camera that kind of obsesses over his craft and that really likes people. I guess that’s kind of my edge and how I’m able to make it work and run a business around it.
My elevator pitch, if you will, is basically that if you hate getting your photo taken, I’m your guy. I work really intentionally and carefully to pull the best out of people, to help them to feel good and have a good time, and then realize that they can take a good photo that actually looks and feels like them. I do this in my professional headshots, I do this if I’m sharing someone’s story with a portrait. I just love showing people the best in themselves. There’s so much in this world clawing at our sense of self-worth and confidence, and I try to be an antidote to that. I want people to feel that deep-down sense of pride and love for themselves. So, full circle, I solve the problem with headshots – which is simply that most people hate getting them.
While I love doing professional headshots and helping people build their brands and what not, my true love is just telling people’s stories through their portrait. I was really fortunate to land a job in Israel in 2019, where an author took me, a translator, and a videographer around the country for five days, interviewing people that had journeyed to Israel to help develop the nation over that last seventy years. These people were all in their 80s and 90s, sharing some of the most powerful and often devastating stories I’ve ever heard in the first-person. Stories of their pilgrimages, escape from war torn countries, surviving the depths of hell of the holocaust. It was just wild, these people that had come from literally all corners of the world, all now approaching the end of their incredible lives…and the opportunity to dignify each of them by sharing their stories and capturing their portraits was I think one of the most meaningful moments in my own life.
In more recent years I discovered my love for teaching. And it makes sense, I’m always talking…like all the time haha. I love sharing what I’m learning and helping other aspiring photographers to have those “aha!” moments, and trying to expedite the process of getting their work up to par and starting their business, and skipping some of the trial and error I had to go through. Like “here’s what you need to know, and here’s what you don’t.”
I’m on some of the social media platforms, like Instagram, Youtube, stuff like that. Again, it’s one of those love-hate things. It’s a huge opportunity for me and pretty much anyone with something they love doing to share their passion, but at the same time it’s kind of ruining all of us too. There’s just a lot of needless pressure that comes with the territory. But I guess that’s the responsibility of the user to manage and maintain awareness of their relationship with it. I often fantasize of becoming a mountain man and living off the land, even though I know I wouldn’t make it even two days out there. But a guy can dream, can’t he?
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Artist are kind of always responding to life by creating something, whether it’s music, painting, photography, poetry; everything is pretty much derived from some experience they’ve had. So experiencing other people’s art is like experiencing their own world, their own life. I just think it’s such a cool way to communicate with one another, to connect, to discover empathy in some dark corner of our life where we previously might not have. Making art is an attempt to make sense of our life, and often turning something tangible and physical out of it, That and of course just that an artist is never really “done”. We never arrive. And that’s an important thing to realize about life.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I feel like all of my answers keep circling back to this same theme, but it’s just really relevant in my life right now – the thing I’m unlearning is simply obsessing with the finish line. Reaching a goal doesn’t bring me the lasting joy that I’m looking for, and it hardly quiets my existential crisis. It’s like trying to buy an expensive car or big house. The satisfaction is so fleeting. Obviously goals are super important, but they don’t fix you. Looking over the horizon all the time is a slippery slope because you are forever-delaying gratification. Also the finish line isn’t even real. It’s illusory. The only real finish line is the end of our life, and I’m certainly not waiting to die, so I better start learning to love each day. So yeah, I’m just learning to fall in love with the work, the process. That’s where the magic always is – here, and now.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.saminterrante.com
- Instagram: @sam_interrante
- Facebook: Sam Interrante Photography
- Linkedin: Sam Interrante
- Youtube: Sam Interrante