We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sydney Claire. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sydney below.
Sydney , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
Being a full-time creative is a tough path in 2023. It’s full of roadblocks, twists and turns, and unforeseen circumstances. It’s full of oversaturation, clickbait, and work that only gains attention because of personal popularity, not necessarily quality.
Happiness as a creative in 2023 is a tough thing to obtain. I think it comes down to reconstructing what life values are important to you. The current economy isn’t built for artists, especially in America. It’s built for e-commerce, finance, the trading of money. Those things have value in 2023. To be a full-time creative in the current economy means you have to really love what you do and to really be down to grind to make enough money to survive in today’s world. It’s a world built on stable income and stability. Don’t expect those two things as an artist in your career. At least not immediately.
I don’t wonder what it would be like to have a regular job. I’ve never done anything other than take photos. I picked up a Barbie point-and-shoot cam at nine years of age and just never put it down. What I do wonder is what it would be like to be born 50 years prior to when I was born. I feel being a creative now is so much harder than it would’ve been if I grew up to blossom as a young artist in the 70s or 80s. Granted, obviously, I’m a female photographer, so that would present boundaries that have been since deconstructed (to extents, still not fully deconstructed boundaries) in the present day art world. What I wonder is what it would be like to grow up as an artist without the influence of the internet, or social media. I would’ve been a photographer regardless, but I feel my work may have been appreciated a little more from an earlier age in my career. I feel my career would have taken off a little faster, because my work wouldn’t be muddled down by an oversaturated market.
Ultimately, every artist in 2023 is competing with the masses. Your work needs to be so good that it stands out like a needle in a haystack. You also have to have the right connections, whether it’s via nepotism (lucky you) or simply spending years putting yourself in the right place at the right time and working your ass off. You really have to love what you do as an artist in present day society to pursue it as a career. It also makes me wonder how many amazing artists gave up because they just couldn’t take the pressure. Modern day society isn’t built for an easy artistic journey and not many prevail and come out on the other side still practicing their craft full-time.
All of this being said, I wouldn’t choose any other career path for my life. I’m a photographer till the day I die. I was a photographer my whole life, I don’t know anything else. I could find happiness in something else, sure, but it’s never going to replicate the happiness I’ve felt seeing my work plastered in Macy’s on 34th street in Manhattan. The happiness that creating my art gives me is not replicable. It’s something much deeper than surface level. It teaches me life lessons in the process and enables me to grow not only as an artist, but as a person. I feel being an artist teaches you character and resilience. It shows you how far you can get if you really really love something. Nothing will stop you from reaching your goals with your craft if it’s really truly what you’re meant for in life. Your heart won’t physically LET you. You’ll do whatever you can to persevere and succeed. That’s the beauty of your life as an artist. I’m lucky to be able to experience it.
Sydney , 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?
For those of you who aren’t familiar with my work, my name is Sydney Claire. I’m a Fashion & Editorial photographer based in New York City.
I started shooting at nine when my parents gave me a little Barbie camera. They still have albums and albums of photos I’ve taken over my childhood, starting with the Barbie camera. My first little shoots were ironically dressing up my Barbie dolls and doing fashion shoots with them, I would set them up and do little “editorial shoots” with the dolls because I didn’t have real models.
I grew up in a really small Connecticut town, so around fourteen/fifteen I started shooting senior photos and weddings whilst waiting tables at a little pizza shop the next town over. I remember charging $50 for senior portraits, I got paid $500 for shooting my first wedding at fifteen years old. I shot it by myself without a backup shooter. I remember comparing the income vs. time exchange at my pizza shop job vs. photography. I also compared my happiness and how they made me feel. I loved my pizza shop job, everyone there was like family and I enjoyed it. I couldn’t really put my finger on it at the time, but I was realizing at a young age that my form of happiness in life was through photography, and that no career would ever provide that amount of happiness other than pursuing my artistic dreams full-time. I kept doing senior photos and weddings, family photos, whatever I could get my hands on. At the time, there was no Instagram, so it was mostly just word-of-mouth referrals. I remember Instagram coming out when I was seventeen years old, my senior year of high school. Around 2013. My first post was a graduation cap. Everything from there was photography. My Instagram still has 2.5k posts. I won’t archive them because I love how it’s a visual representation of my growth as an artist from the age of seventeen. You can literally see the progression, how my vision changes, the consistency in style whilst growing visually and making stronger images.
I went to art school for college in Boston at Lesley College of Art and Design and graduated with a BFA in photography and a minor in graphic design. I waited tables throughout my time at school to make extra money, and would make money in the summer doing senior photos and weddings and use that money for my spending money for my semesters. I interned a ton of places during my time in school to get a feel for corporate photography. I worked for Governor Deval Patrick as a staff photographer (he was awesome), the Dana Farber Cancer Institute as a Staff Photographer (this was really great but also really tough to take on every day), and Lord & Taylor for a summer as a Staff Photographer. I really hated Lord & Taylor because I felt like a machine taking e-comm photos on flatlays and mannequins every day. It took away the artistic freedom from what I did and I really disliked that.
When I graduated College, I got a job as a staff photographer photographing inventory and marketing content for Herb Chambers BMW in Boston. I spent around eight months working this job. My boss was cool and taught me a lot, but my biggest issue with the job was getting home at 7 pm when it was dark out. I would still do everything I could to shoot. Meet up with friends after work, dress them up, shoot in the freezing cold / dark with a flash and create editorial work. Ultimately, I still felt that I never had the time to make the work to elevate my career. There was also never going to be the right talent level around me in Boston. No matter how good I got as a photographer, there would never be the right hair and makeup or talent to elevate my work to the level it needed to be. In July of 2018, a little under a year after I graduated, I got an opportunity to go to Korea for two weeks, paid for through a photography trade for an organization. I subleased out my room in Boston for the last month of the lease, found a place to move into in NYC with two random boys on Facebook marketplace (that, thank god, ended up being really cool roommates) all while traveling through South Korea. When I got back I packed my bags, and left. When I moved to NYC I had $300 to my name after putting down my security deposit on my apartment. I’ll c forget the number in my bank account and thinking, “I’m just gonna make this work.”
I got a waitressing job within around a week of living in New York. I went into every restaurant within ten blocks of my Brooklyn, asked for a manager, and dropped my resume. I’d go back in after a few days if they didn’t call to check on my application. I finally got a job waiting tables at a fancy restaurant a few blocks away from my apartment. I made really good money there for awhile until the restaurant unfortunately went bankrupt and closed. I did what I was good at doing: found another job at a local wine bar and kept moving forward.
I spent the next few years working various waitressing, bartending, and nightclub jobs five nights a week. Some nights, I’d get home off the train at 4:45 in the morning and walk home. I just kept hustling. While working side jobs, I shot whatever I could. I marched into every modeling agency in NYC and physically asked for a contact to their testing department. I cold emailed every single large brand and publication.
There are two specific stories from my first year in New York City that stick out in my head specifically. The first story involves the only person who answered those fifty or so cold emails I sent to publications and brands. His name was Chad McCabe. He was, at the time, the Art Director at Paper Magazine. He liked my work and said he had a small shoot coming up for a print and online feature in Paper featuring the artist Dan Colen. Chad needed portraits to go along with an interview that would be happening at Dan’s studio in Red Hook for an article about an upcoming exhibition of his work. I remember the shoot specifically because I was so nervous. I took the ferry from Williamsburg to Red Hook and pulled up to the studio. I remember the shoot going okay. Dan had a sharp attitude and snapped at me for asking his assistant a question at one point. He was a typical NYC artist with a small ego complex. Nevertheless, I just smiled and powered through the shoot. The images came out nice, I still have the print issue on my coffee table. It was my first large print publication. I didn’t get paid for the shoot and I remember my old-school, grew-up-tough father yelling on me on the phone for an hour after finding out I wasn’t compensated.
The irony of all of this is that this isn’t the end of the story. I got a call probably a good three years later from Chad. I picked up. He said, “Hi Sydney, It’s Chad McCabe. I don’t know if you remember me, but I hired you for a gig a while ago when I was the Art Director at Paper.” “Of Course I remember you,” I said. “I don’t forget anybody and you gave me my first gig in NYC, thank you for that.”
I told him I was forever appreciative of the gig he gave me. He then went on to tell me that he had been following my work on Instagram for the past few years and was now the Art Director for Netflix’s editorial magazine, Netflix Queue. He said he had been seeing the shoots I’d been doing via Facetime during COVID and wanted to hire me to shoot Phoebe Dynevor from the show Bridgerton for an upcoming print issue, via Facetime (she lived in London and Paper is in NYC). It was my biggest gig to date. I remember I called my father and told him after. I said, “Remember my first gig ever in NYC, the one I did for free for that magazine?” and then told him what had happened and about Chad hiring me for the Netflix gig. He was speechless. You never know when your connections will come back to help you. I did that one free gig, and it ended up equating to me doing the biggest gig of my career at the time. I think that’s the beauty of being patient as an artist. You never know when the work is going to pay off, but I promise it eventually will when you least expect it.
The second story is about a negative situation that I turned positive when I first moved to NYC. I actually almost got scammed by a fake Vogue email. I was super upset when it turned out to be a facade. It had been my dream to work for Vogue for most of my early career. I randomly had an idea after and guessed the actual email of the person the scammer was impersonating by using the scam email and formulating the real email by researching the Conde Nast email format and guessing it off of the fake email combined with the researched format. I told the person, who was the fashion editor at Vogue at the time, what had happened with the scam email. I stated I had just moved from Boston and was a fashion and editorial photographer. I explained how I guessed his correct email off of the scam email, and how I’d do anything to get an actual meeting in with him and introduce myself and my work.
I guessed the email correctly. He responded. He explained he was sorry for what had happened, but so glad that I had reached out. He stated that he wasn’t the best person to talk to about photo, but looped me in an email with the photo editor at Vogue at the time and explained the situation. She granted me a meeting with her to look at my work.
I think about this meeting often. I went in that day, nervous, shaking, and starry-eyed. The senior photo editor was sick that day, so I ended up meeting with the junior photo editor. I remember sitting down and blabbing about my work, which is obviously nothing compared to what it was now (I had just moved from Boston). The biggest thing I take away from this meeting is how differently I would’ve gone in present-day with my confidence and book currently. Instead of going in starry-eyed, I’d go in confident. I wouldn’t try to convince them why they should hire me. I’d tell them why it would be an ASSET to work with an artist like me. I’d go in with the attitude of not someone that was star-struck, but someone that was the star. The entire meeting will forever stick out in my head as an all-around critical learning experience in my first few months in NYC.
The gig I’m most proud of is my National Levi’s Campaign. Last year, when I was twenty-six years old, I received the craziest email of my entire life. I remember receiving it and thinking, “There’s no way this is real. It has to be a scam”. I started researching the emails attached in the recipients line and the production company, and when I realized it was real, I collapsed on my floor and started crying. I had received an email asking if I was available to shoot a national campaign for Levi’s. It was a five day shoot in LA, all expenses paid, and the biggest paycheck amount for one gig I’d seen in my twenty-six years. I had never shot a full-scale national campaign before. I was unsigned, no agent (still am unsigned/unrepresented). I flew out two weeks later, lit an entire 4,000 foot studio, and shot an entire campaign for the brand. It was the best five days of my entire life. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to shoot it. The brand was so open to my style, they hired me for it specifically. They let me shoot a mix of digital and film, and exported every single photo onto the drive with my color processing.
I remember getting back from LA and feeling like I had dreamed up the entire thing. It felt like an illusion in my imagination until I received the paycheck. The best feeling, though, was seeing my photos in stores everywhere. My friends started sending me them from Macys, Levis Stores, and Targets throughout the US. My parents sent me photos of the entire Levi’s outlet in Connecticut, back to front, covered in my work. Down to the window displays. They sent me a selfie together with my photo in the back, and it made me cry because it was the first time I saw genuine pride in my father’s eyes. I went to Macy’s on 34th street and saw my photos plastered throughout the Levi’s section, bigger than life-size. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to describe the level of happiness I felt. I cried so hard. I had dreamed of this moment since I was like twelve years old and I had finally done it. My photos in a store? For everyone to see? Incomparable.
I think my favorite thing about my work is my consistent, clear style. You can always tell I took a photo. It comes down to the coloring and energy, but I’ve kept my style consistent whilst growing and improving throughout the years. I also love how I make everyone feel beautiful and powerful. You can see it in my images. I aim to make all of my subjects feel like absolute supermodels.
I also have been told I am a “diverse” photographer, but I hate this comment. Personally, I feel that in 2023, we should all be photographing a diverse range of people. I’m not talking just race, either. I’m talking about disabled talent, older talent, trans and LGBTQA+ talent. If you, as a young upcoming artist, aren’t shooting a wide range of people, you are contributing to the issue of continuing the lack of diversity in our industries. If every single upcoming young photographer shot a wide range of diversity, it would be the norm in the industry and would actively start to shift it. It’s up to our generation to put out the work we want to see in the next wave of the art industry. The more we normalize being a photographer that photographs a diverse range of subjects, the more the industry will actually change.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I think the most rewarding part of being a creative is inspiring other artists with your work. Some of my most meaningful messages have come from a random direct message on Instagram. I’ve had multiple students in South America write to me saying that my work inspires them, and that they wrote about me for their school projects. Having your work reach countries you’ve never even been to and people you’ve never even met in person is an indescribable feeling.
I also feel that being a creative allows you to experience life and human connection in a rare and beautiful way. A specific woman that always comes to mind is my friend Cynthia. She’s in her late seventies, and we became friends in a very unconventional way. She came into a restaurant i was waiting tables at a few years ago. I remember being absolutely struck by how beautiful she was. She was so elegant. I came up to the table and I gave her a card. I’m very particular about asking people to shoot. I never force it, I simply hand them a card, tell them they have an awesome look, and that I’m a Fashion photographer in NYC. I say “check out my work and if you’d like to work together, shoot me an email.” I don’t like to force anything on the spot, it’s their ultimate decision and up to the subjects ultimate discretion if they want to work with me or not. Cynthia was so taken aback when I told her she had a great face and asked if she’d ever modeled before. She said she hadn’t and that she’d always be down to try. I handed her a card and told her to reach out if she’d ever be down.
Cynthia emailed me a few weeks later. We ended up speaking on the phone for awhile, so was down to do a shoot. She was nervous because she’d never modeled in her life, but she was excited and I could tell it was something new and interesting for her. I said I’d set up a shoot and a team with a location and let her know details. I picked all of my closest connections for makeup, hair, and styling. She was a black woman, so I made sure to pick creatives that had strong work with women of color and were used to working with women of color. I booked out the studio for the day of my birthday as a birthday present to myself. Cynthia showed up that day and was super nervous in the beginning. She brought her cousin along and he sat and watched the whole process. My favorite part was watching Cynthia’s confidence grow through the looks. You could physically see her start to get comfortable throughout the shoot and start to let her guard down. At the end she was smiling ear to ear. She sent me a text on the way home that I’ll never forget. It made me cry on a subway full of people. She thanked me and said how much the day had meant to her. Cynthia and I remained friends. One night, we sat in a Jazz Bar in the West Village together and watched her husband, Jack, play jazz. he’s in his early 90’s and still plays on stage. I learned Cynthia was a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital for 42 years. We talked about life and I couldn’t help but think in that moment how beautiful the fact that photography had brought us together.
In my own personal experience, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative has been being able to impact people’s lives with my work, whether it’s something small, or something big. That’s something no amount of money can buy. It comes through the art of human connection.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
I think the hardest thing to explain to non-creatives as a creative is the artistic path to success. I find that ultimately, many people, especially those around me that have worked regular jobs their entire lives, struggle to understand my immediate life choices and decisions revolving around my career.
I’ve always had a hard time getting my father to understand my life path. My father is the hardest working man I know. He also grew up extremely hard. He lost his father at the age of thirteen and experienced a lot of financial hardship from a young age. My dad isn’t particularly book-smart, but he’s street-smart and he’s amazing at math. He worked his whole life owning various self-ran small businesses. For awhile, when I was young, it was driving a bread truck route to local convenience stores in a semi-truck. He then moved onto selling cars, and that’s what he’s done for basically as long as I can remember. My father sells used cars at a small dealership in the neighborhood he grew up in. What makes my dad successful is his people skills. He thrives off of personal connections and word-of-mouth referral. He’s super old-school in his ways, from both a business and a parenting perspective. This is where my father and I struggle to see eye to eye. I understand his perspective. He grew up tough and prides himself on “tooth and nail” hard work. My father hates the word free. When I moved to NYC and was shooting a lot of free work to get my name out, he couldn’t look past the fact I wasn’t getting paid.
My father thinks of success as a linear ladder. Work hard every day and you’ll eventually succeed. While he isn’t incorrect, my father has a hard time understanding that as a creative, not everything revolves around money. Ultimately, to be a successful creative financially, you need to do everything you can to get your work out. Sometimes that means doing collaborative work where there is no exchange of money. Honestly, a lot of my own personal favorite photos out of my own work are from collaborative projects. When you eliminate the pressure money and deliverables bring to a shoot, you’re able to create just to create. That’s when I make my most raw, organic work that feels the most authentic personification of myself and my creative vision. A lot of unpaid gigs have led to my biggest paid gigs because the right person saw the collaborative work. That’s something my dad is starting to understand now that I’m a little older. He can physically start to see my connections paying off, both artistically and financially, in my career.
I think it’s hard for people who aren’t creatives to understand that nothing is immediate or overnight. Success as a creative is earned through hard work, connections, and a lot of failures and “no’s”. If I got a dollar for every time someone told me no in my artistic career, I’d be a very rich woman. I never let those no’s stop me. Ever. For every single no I heard, I worked ten times harder. And maybe it paid off a week later, maybe it paid of three years later. That’s part of the beauty of being an artist. It’s unpredictable, but it’s rewarding and seems to pay off when you need the motivation the most.
Contact Info:
- Website: sydneyclairephotography.com
- Instagram: @___sydneyclaire
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SydneyClairePhotography
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydneyclairephotography/
Image Credits
Photo 1 – “Moss” Editorial Photo 2 – Layla Synclaire Photo 3 – Mohamed Ouedraogo Photo 4 – Ritta Kelly & Savannah Moroder Photo 5 – Sandy Liang for CFDA Photo 6 – Taty Geneste Photo 7 – Dosha Deng