Featured Photographer: Tay Sanders

Tay Sanders 

"I'm from Dunedin, New Zealand. I live in the Pacific Northwest.

 I'm 23. I take pictures. I'm still trying to figure things out. 

I try to just have fun with whatever i'm doing.

If I cant have fun in the most desperate or boring times,

 then I feel like i'm doing something wrong."

"I mainly shoot with film:

 An old Nikkormat my father gave me,

 a Canon A1 my friend lets me borrow, and a point & shoot I thrifted.

I started shooting when I was as a teenager. 

But I stopped because I just felt like I was terrible at it,

 or that I had the wrong direction.

I picked it up again in my last year of college."

"I love photography because I can capture moments as they happen.

 I can immortalize people. Photos also transcend language,

 and people have an attachment to them 

that they don't have to other art."

 

" I'm inspired by : Nan Goldin. Robert Mapplethrope. Ash Thayer.

My friends. My lover. My community. My father. 

The desert. Crows. Bad Poetry. Friendly Strangers. 

Faces. Emotion. Bodies. Intimacy."

“Behind the story I tell is the one I don't.

Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”  - Dorothy Allison

                

"You do not need to go to art school. You do not need to get paid. 

Your art is for you, and for whoever else you give it to."

"Drink too much coffee. Go on a bender. Get really, really high. 

Leave town. Read a book. Visit grandma. Read another book.

 Turn off the computer. Go to a poetry reading. Sleep. "

(Interview by Carli Rentsch)