Sabrina Santiago

Hello! It’s a pleasure to be here. Right now, I’m sitting in my East Williamsburg apartment where I’ve lived for five years, with my roommates and my cat. It’s a lovely place right next to a park which is like my big back yard and I’m incredibly lucky to also have a shared studio space ten minutes away from here. People tend to use their studios more when they’re within walking distance and I’d definitely say that it’s my case. I do a lot of archiving work there and I’ve recently been experimenting a lot with Super 8. I love to use my studio to organise small, intimate screenings for myself and friends — we go there at any time of the day or night and watch Super 8 films. So much of my work is done outdoors that it’s actually nice to be in different environments - it’s a whole new second space compared to working outside. Sometimes, I get restless in the middle of the night and I’m lucky to have a different place I can escape to.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in images. I attended NYU, where I was lucky enough to create my own major. I knew that I wanted to study Photography and I was also able to add Psychology and Art History to that, which gave me a complete understanding of the art form. Photography and Psychology actually make a lot of sense together: when you look at an image, what are you thinking, what is it about your experience that ties you to a specific image? When taking candid pictures especially, not only do you understand more about yourself, you also understand a lot while the exchange is happening. I took a photo of a girl with a boom box on Essex Street here in NYC and in that moment, we had an innate understanding of each other. I can’t really explain the energy of that moment, which is all related to our psyche — some pictures you feel more connected to than others, because photography and psychology are inherently intertwined. I met a great combination of people at school, so it was definitely worth spending money on my degree, including the amazing professor, photographer and editor Jeffrey Henson Scales, who is still my mentor and continues to help me to this day.

I carry my cameras around everywhere and still get excited about the fact that I have access to everything around me. I leave the house and think: who am I going to meet today? Where are my mind and body going to take me? I always start off with an idea of where I need to end up, I’ll walk up to the Upper East Side, and make my way from there. Recently, I’ve been trying to explore areas that I don’t know as well, like Staten Island or The Bronx. I’ve actually been working on a book project which will include the five different boroughs. It's a street photography book, featuring different layers of collaboration. When I decide to take someone’s picture, I always go in with the intention of doing them justice. Body language and the way you physically approach someone are crucial here: at times, people don't vibe with your energy and with others it feels like they’ve known you their whole life. It’s extremely rare for someone to be offended, nine out of ten times they will say yes — especially if the light looks amazing. Street Photography is not staged: I want to make eye contact, so I’ll walk a different way when I want them to look at me. People in the street are usually in their element, so it can sometimes flow very naturally. If you can go one way, if I hadn’t turned left back there…

I love the greats, street photographers like the iconic Vivian Maier or Diane Arbus. I’m actually incredibly lucky to have loved some iconic photographers’ work, then got to meet them and loved them even more. Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures is one of my all-time favourite bodies of work. I spent so much time studying and loving those images and it’s such a special feeling when you have an idea of the artist and meet them, making you understand the photos even more. I’m super inspired by Justine, she changes her medium a lot, she also experiments a lot with collage. Photography can be something that you pick up at one point and go back to, as an artist I believe that it’s so important to explore other mediums — like what I’m doing with Super 8 right now! I’m still learning a lot, and asking myself what my voice can add to it all. We’re all beginners at some point and that's part of the beauty of this life!

I live in NYC, it’s part of me and my upbringing, I don’t want to say that it’s central to my work, it just happens to be where I exist. I love it here, it’s my home but I also want to capture other places, which will ultimately give me a better understanding of people and the world. I’m doing a residency this August in Knoxville, Tennessee: it's my first time there and I’m super excited. I'm going to be there for a month and will be doing workshops for kids on Super 8 and polaroid, which is organised by a community radio station where they talk about non-traditional forms of media. When I was in CDMX for a month, I basically did the same thing as I do in NYC: I followed my gut and the colours, and where my spirit decides to lead me when I’m not in my comfort zone. My pictures reflected my time there really well, I also ended up doing a mini series on women and children only subway cars — I realised that I felt really intrigued by the idea of that. There was a motherly warmth and a sense of comfort, as a woman I was in  there with all these other women and this deep sense of trust came over me, like I could fall asleep here and be completely fine and safe.

If we go back to the psychology behind photography, who I am is reflected in my pictures. What I’m actually doing is creating a visual archive: this is what was happening at this time in the world, how people were dressed and presented themselves. If we didn’t have that, we wouldn't get a sense of what things looked like or what the future holds. A lot of the images we know have come from the same kind of person, who most likely wasn’t a woman. Today, we have access to a much better, well-rounded view of women on the street, not only canonised street photographers. By capturing womanhood, or a person of colour, we were able to understand certain parts of our history but our ownership and authorship were lacking. We should know the names of more women of colour photographers, it would have been very nice to grow up with more access to them.

I usually carry three cameras with me: my polaroid, a 35 and a Super 8. I really liked the idea of having an extension of stills that I was taking, which is why I started using a polaroid as well. I’ve been doing that for a while, specifically because I love how someone is reflected in different formats — I’m a huge fan of experimenting with different tonal qualities. With polaroids, I love the imminent experience of sharing the result with the person being photographed, there’s an element of instant gratification. Polaroids have such an intimate, specific feel to them and are very reflective of the time periods in which we’re used to seeing them: they just make sense in my practice. I have a whole collection of them and would love to have a show with them soon.

It really depends on the situation. A lot of the time with commissions, you’re given fifteen to forty-five minutes to be in a place with a given person and have free reign for that limited amount of time. My process is usually to ask myself, has this person been portrayed this way before? and how my work might then feel different. One particularly fun portrait I have is of Jodie Comer, we were literally given fifteen minutes to shoot with a photographer from Washington Post and had to take her portrait in the same place. It was raining that day and I decided to use the rooftop — suddenly, a beautiful blue appeared in the sky after the rain and the background looked amazing and brought light that made her look incredible. The same spontaneity of street photography comes into making a portrait, especially when you’re out of the studio. If you’re shooting on Coney Island for example, someone cool can walk in the background. A portrait is definitely a collaborative process and a special portrait will always depend on the energy of each person.

This collaboration came together during a special time in my life. The idea was to create a new project that shows girlhood currently. It’s a modern spinoff of Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures book, which is an incredibly special body of work for me. She coauthored the project and I got to cast the girls in the town that I grew up in: girls from the Dairy Queen, from the mall and on social media. We shot in high school spots I remember being in. Hanging out with them brought back pockets of my girlhood: what they were talking about, frustrated about; I was constantly reminded of who I was when I was existing in those same spaces. I love longer-form projects, in which you can develop a relationship with your subjects — I think collaborations mean so much to both parties, those girls will always have and hopefully cherish those pictures. This work can carry on in printed media, a hard cover they might be able to show their kids one day.

It’s both natural and a choice, I want to document what it means to be both a woman and a girl. I’m particularly interested in the formative times in women's lives and I believe women should be documenting each other at every stage of their lives as well: teenagehood, pregnant women, older women. I’m interested in these in-between stages, it’s almost a subconscious attraction and part of who I might be drawn to on the street, that woman to woman connection is part of who I am.

Self-portraiture is definitely a huge part of my portfolio. I recently found one that I took when I was about eight or nine years old and I love looking at her now, whether she wondered where I was heading. I was already documenting myself at that age, doing the exact same thing that I do now, only with a stuffed animal in the back and a very serious expression on my face: maybe I already knew what I was working towards. I take self-portraits very often and think everyone should take more pictures of themselves — they might even build into a body of work. I recently did a lecture at a college where the girls were saying they loved my self-portraits and the art form in general; I think they remind people of certain times of their life. It’s a very important question of experience and ownership of your image. When I look at my archive, every picture is tied to a specific life event, to a breakup, a slice of life, I’ve been documenting it all for a long time.

I just got on Substack and I’m really excited about it. I’ve been active and shared my work on TikTok and Instagram but am interested in other platforms. I’ve started to read and write more and I want to see where I can do longer-form content and videos. People are engaging more and more and I want to experiment more with video. These are all places to explore new ideas, longer form projects or even in-person workshops. I’ve been teaching a bit and love to do it in a fun way so that people want to engage with the experience. In person at my studio could also be an option — I love to write and give myself permission to do that alongside my photos.