Words & photographs by Sasan Sayyar

Here's how I've been feeling on this subject for a while...

I'm not a photographer. This isn’t to say I can’t play the role of a photographer, because as a matter of fact, I can, and I can do it very well. There are numerous reasons I don’t like being labeled a “photographer” but ultimately I don’t believe I deserve it. I don’t spend the majority of my week shooting photos, I prefer to keep it a hobby of mine. I don’t make my primary income taking portraits or shooting fashion photography for magazines. I hate putting a price on my artistry, however I do paid gigs here & there to supplement my income. I don’t wish to ever make a career from photography, (at least not one which involves working for any person or company as a photographer) but I’d be lying if I said taking paid gigs hasn’t landed me in some super dope settings. Shit I even had an opportunity to spend a few days in Texas last year because of this hobby of mine. I had the privilege of meeting extraordinary people over the last few years because of this too, especially through the peak of Instagram and all. Big shouts out to Meez, John Asuncion, & Joe Lopez, some of the coolest cats I’ve gotten to meet since picking up photography. But back to my main point, I don’t deserve to be labeled a photographer, real photographers are grinding daily with a camera on hand nonstop. That’s not me, you can peep my Instagram page or my portfolio online and get a clue of how my photos look and say I’ve got talent or an eye or whatever, but all that shit is just what I want people to see. Behind the scenes I do a lot of other stuff, I move cars, help my father with accounting work occasionally, sell things, and do all kinds of other random shit for cash. I’m just a young guy with a vision and my tool to express my feelings just so happens to be a camera right now.

I got the chance to spend the day at the first ever concert/festival/show held on a ship. The USS Hornet here in the Bay Area (Pier 3, former Alameda naval station) was home to the “Ship Show” festival which took place last weekend and your boy got an all access pass to check it out… I was invited so I figured hey, free show… why not? I’ll go shoot some photos and peep the scene, have a good time. I can’t believe I used to pay big dollars to attend shit like this haha. I won’t deny it, when I skip past the fat ass line without having to wait in it I almost feel like a somebody for a quick second even though I’m nobody. I was being extremely lazy and I didn’t want to take too many photos when I first got on the ship, call it UNinspired by everything. I snapped a rather random array of photos actually…

After I ran into my good homie Joe Lopez on the ship, he and I decided that the music being played wasn’t particularly our scene, so we did what any real rebels would do… hit the lower deck and explore what’s normally open for the museum and forget the do not enter signs. Now I don’t know if this shit was just staged beautifully or if the scenes we got to witness were rather perfectly preserved… I think it’s the latter of the two but that’d be a good thing to Google. Either way, we came across everything from the cafeteria where sailors used to cook, to bunk beds and community bathrooms, and even a small store the sailors would visit to purchase things like smokes or razors… Some real vintage products in the showcases there! I saw what looked like the first Gilette razor ever produced, and some classic Lucky Strike matchboxes… Keep in mind there’s still a concert going on directly above us on top of the aircraft carrier.

Once the sun dropped below the Earth people started shivering, shouts out to Juleon for wearing nothing but a nylon shirt to the event… Anyways, I know I keep getting sidetracked but I’d like to make one last point before I go. There must’ve been a million and one “photographers” there, all rushing to front stage when Wiz Khalifa came to perform, struggling to get the same exact photo as the next man… The way I see it, I’m standing on the side of the stage negotiating the entire situation, thinkin to myself well damn, that’s a bunch of bodies lookin like sardines jammed in a can and I’m only pushin about 5’7”, should I charge my way through all this to get a photo that’ll look like all the rest? Do I even care about Wiz Khalifa or if anyone likes this photo? I’m not even being paid here, I think I’ll just enjoy my time instead… yeah… that’s another key point to why I’m not a photographer… I’m not interested in looking like the same as anybody because I’m not, but I’m also never doing extra shit to be different either, it just happens to be this way. I feel like an alien, I always have, if I shared my real thoughts with everybody I knew I’d really only have my original Martinez friends, and even that’s questionable. I’m on my way to figuring it out, I might die in the process, but I’ll die moving forward. That’s what it’s all about, advancing… as long as you get up day after day and work your ass off on whatever you’re doing… you’ll make progress, multiply the money, and you’ll be great.