We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Sido. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.

Sarah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

As someone who has had two creative careers, first as an actress, and now as a photographer, I feel like I’ve experienced both the scenario of being very young in a career and of coming to something later, with more life experience under my belt. I began photographing for clients when my son was quite young, and I sometimes wish that I’d started my photography business before being a parent. I used to be able to devote myself to acting in such a complete way, and now, as a parent, photography will never get my undivided attention. With that said, I don’t believe I would make the work that I make as a photographer if I weren’t also a mother. Mothers and children are really the heart of my work, and I don’t think I would see them and connect the way I do if I wasn’t a mother myself. Basically, I think that artistically, coming to photography when I did has brought a depth to my work that I might not have been able to access when I was younger, but as far as the business side of things goes, I’m sometimes jealous of people that can give everything to their work.

At the end of the day, life unfolds for us as it does. I have always been interested in the same things, both when I was acting and as a photographer. I’m interested in connection. I’m interested in beauty, emotion, vulnerability, playfulness. I want to explore small stories. I’ve been so lucky to have been able to pursue work both in front of and behind the camera.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I never know quite where to begin with this question. I’m a photographer in Los Angeles who is interested in photographing the whole lifecycle – love, babies and family life, artistic process and professional achievement – and what ties all of it together is my approach and point of view. I am very influenced by documentary photography and creative portraiture. In the last few years I have also begun to photograph commercial and fashion work as well, for companies that want the kind of organic, real life feeling in their imagery that I bring to my retail clients.

I can’t talk about my work today without talking about the fact that I spent the first decades of my life as an actor. So much of acting is connecting and presence, and I think that is one of the biggest skill sets that I bring to my photography. Connection is paramount to me and is what I am looking to photograph, regardless of what the subject is. Certainly when it’s a couple or family, that connection and how it makes itself seen in the little moments is everything. But even when I’m photographing a solo person, connection is at the forefront of my mind. My connection to the subject, the subjects connection to themselves, maybe their connection to their art or work, to their surroundings or nature. There is always something to be found and mined.

Presence for me as a photographer is really about being a witness. Being present with the vulnerability of my subjects letting me into their lives to be photographed. Being present with kids. I’m not afraid of the chaos of a family with little ones running around. I love it, actually. I don’t go in with an agenda and needing something from them. I enter the shoot just ready to be present and witness what unfolds. I think this is why everyone ends up enjoying their shoot so much more than they perhaps expected to. I think we all have a real need to be witnessed in our lives. A shoot gets to be a moment where everything else stops – the to do lists and work and non-stop pinging devices in our pockets – and just be. And when they get to see all of that reflected back to them in photographs, their story preserved as something worthwhile and beautiful, it’s always quite moving to me how much that means to people.

I grew up doing a lot of photography. We lived on a mountaintop in Vermont, and had a darkroom in our house and my dad taught me to develop film. But then all of my creative energies were directed towards acting and I didn’t come back to photography seriously until I had a child. I became so much more interested in the stories that were playing out in front of me. Babies and growing bellies, and the unabashed emotions of toddlers, all drenched in this golden southern California light. Luckily, the people around me were interested in the photographs I was making and my transition into photographing professionally happened quite organically.

One of the things that I am most proud of is that I’ve been able to build a business that is so informed by word of mouth and referrals. Clients have an experience and receive photographs that mean something to them, and so they want their friends to have that experience too.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Maybe the biggest gift from acting, that I got to take with me into starting my photography business, was my comfort with rejection. No one naturally likes rejection. Of course it hurts. But I do believe that we can become much more comfortable with it and that it is an absolutely vital skill as an artist. If you can’t handle rejection, you don’t put yourself out there, and that’s something that you absolutely must do. Whether it is sharing images on social media, pitching yourself for a job, or having a discovery call with a potential client, you cannot let your fear of their opinion of you stop you from presenting your work. I don’t know that I viewed it as building resilience as it was happening, but I am now so grateful to younger me for pursuing a path that forced me to get comfortable with rejection. Acting can be brutal, but every day of getting back out there after not getting something you’ve worked particularly hard on, and doing it with an open heart, built a type of resilience that now feels like a really necessary skill.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I certainly don’t have all of the answers here, but I want to speak to being a mother and pursuing a life in the arts. I feel like the conversation in this country about being a working parent is always in the context of people in the corporate world. Affordable childcare is so deeply needed by all of us. But as an artist or creative, we have the added complication of irregular schedules and incomes, and also need flexibility in our options to help deal with that. Those early months and years of mothering can be so isolating and difficult, but also a really rich time for our interior, creative lives. I think we would all be better served if more parents had access to affordable, flexible childcare to allow them to make their work.

We also all need community and the more we can do to foster that, the better off we will all be. For me, community ended up being the real answer to the challenge of how to work without regular childcare. Other moms saved me, and still do, and I’m always looking for how to pay that back. But it would be so much easier if we as a society valued the work of raising children and didn’t put all of the onus of figuring it out onto individual parents.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.studiosido.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarah_sido/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-sido-commercial-photographer/

Image Credits
The 1st image – the portrait of me – is by Lauren Wade All other photographs are taken by me, Sarah Sido