Sarah witt
It can all be very simple. You meet someone, you say hi, you share stories, you eat tacos, you laugh most of the time doing it all, and then a friendship starts. This is how it all began for me and Sarah Witt, under the Moroccan stars waiting for yet another day of perfect surf. Sarah, other than being a girl with one of the most contagious smiles ever seen, is a very talented photographer from the Southeast of France. Around three years ago, after living in several places around the world, she decided to set base in Biarritz, a vibrant surf town located on the west coast of her beloved France. (French people and the love for their country.) La vie douce has done it's magic, and the inspiration that comes with living next to the ocean has been defining in Sarah’s work ever since, thank god.
In her work, Sarah is a profound lover of film photography. The colors of life by the seaside, black and white scenes highlighting aesthetics and simplicity, and raw, emotional images of faraway places, she finds a way to portray them all. Here we catch up :
B : Sarah, so good to connect again. Tell us how you been and what have you been up to these last couple of months?
S : Hi Jonas, so good to connect again with you and discover this crazy brand Bundu ! Waahoo I don’t know where to start because so many things have happened recently. I’ve decided to turn more into photojournalism as I wanted to get engaged through my work and make my images useful. I’ve been following an intensive 6 months photojournalism class and then joined a reporter agency. This new dimension in photography led me to collaborate with the press recently, which was something completely new for me. Here is an example of a recent article for Les Hibajeuses, a group of women fighting for their right to play football. Another project in the same vein of getting engaged is that I recently joined a little team within the French Ministry of Culture, and we’re fighting for less inequalities against women photographers and gender minorities.
B : That is so cool to hear that you’re broadening your view on different subjects nowadays. Where did it all begin for you, this love for photography?
S : Ahha it all started from a crazy story ! While I was a student, we were supposed to do internships in business companies and that was something I didn’t like as I felt bored. So I found another kind of internship : working as an air hostess for Air France ! This was one of the best adventures of my life, starting the week in the US and ending it in China or Japan. I saw so many different capital cities, I wanted to remember all of them perfectly and started to photograph each stopover I was flying to. Bamako, Dallas, Libreville, Beijing… random cities that I would have never visited otherwise. That’s how I fell in love with film photography. I then decided to learn about darkroom techniques at the Centre Jean Verdier in Paris and learning about this kind of magic pushed me deeper and deeper in this form of art.
B : Something that’s been very present in your work has been a little island in the Philippines called Siargao, can you tell us what brought you there and what inspires you so much about this place?
S : Aaah Siargao ! This Philippine island where my little sister Clara used to live. We have always loved to travel as a family so it came up very naturally that I visited her multiple times and immersed myself in her life there. A life full of surf and tranquility. In Siargao I discovered two things really important for me. First, this beautiful island is where I started surfing and underwater photography with my Nikonos camera. Second, I discovered that my sister was a muse for me. That one of my greatest sources of inspiration was right here in front of me. Since then we have continued to travel a lot together, recently to Mexico and Costa Rica, and I kept photographing her :)
B : It’s been great following your journey so far, and obviously we are very excited about your next step. Any upcoming projects so far you’d like to share with us?
S : What I’d love to dive in is long-term photography projects that tell true stories. Not just the one-day shooting but real work over multiple weeks. I’m currently working on 2 different long-term photojournalism projects, one of them is about a rare skin disease that I am trying to photograph both in a documentary & artistic way, to express both the beauty and the dangerousity of this skin disorder. The other one project is still “secret” for now but will take me on an adventure to Tamil Nadu, India this coming summer… I’ll share more soon about this :)
Photos by Sarah Witt
