Member Spotlight: Andrew Saliski

CMC member, Andrew Saliski, discusses how being a CMC member helped him evolve as a photographer, how his nightly trips to Time Square have been helping him stay creative during the pandemic, and what he believes makes a good photograph.Read the full interview below.

How did you get your start in photography?

I started off when I was a teenager with a Canon point and shoot that luckily offered manual as one of its shooting modes, allowing me to get a rough overview of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO (that I would come to rely on in the years to come). I was originally taking photos of my friends doing teenage things, but eventually it turned into something I would bring with me to the parks on Staten Island to photograph landscapes. I was strictly a landscape/cityscape photographer for the first 10-years I owned a camera, doing everything I could to avoid having people in anything I photographed.

I put the camera down for a while and focused exclusively on music for years. It wasn’t until my day job asked me to photograph an album cover for a record we were producing that I picked up a camera again. It renewed my interest and I started taking my camera with me again to different places, still mainly focusing on landscapes, but also learning a few things about portraiture. I had some of these new photos on my phone when I met Sal from CMC at a mutual friends birthday party, who then invited me to come to a meeting. I had already purchased a medium format film camera at this point, but then a number of people from CMC took me under their wing and showed me the ropes, from how to develop film, to who the great photographers are, to how to discuss and critique photographs. It’s been an evolving learning experience since then.

How have you been staying creative during the pandemic?

Initially, I wasn’t doing much. My office was on the opposite side of the parking lot at Adorama, and since the work from home order came down I was no longer near my film supplier. I was really only shooting film at the time, and my cameras sat on the shelves collecting dust. Once late April rolled around, my girlfriend and I did a few portraiture sessions in my apartment, and eventually I went out locally in LIC for street photography, but this time with a digital camera. I started hitting Manhattan more regularly after George Floyd. Since then, I’ve been working on night time street photography and hitting Times Square a lot. Like most New Yorkers, I used to avoid Times Square at all costs, but now that most of the tourists are gone, there is room to breathe and operate and it allows for some great photo opportunities. Plus the lighting at night is ideal when you have to work all day and can’t hit the streets until after 6pm.

Where do you get your inspiration? What and/or who inspires you?

I’d say the inspiration comes from the aspiration to have my own style; for someone to look at a photograph and instantly know that I was the one who took it. You know when you’re looking at a Penn, Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Smith, etc. photograph. Reaching that level is something I aspire to achieve so the inspiration is all of those people that came before me. They mastered the craft in all aspects, so I’ll turn to them for guidance through photo books or old interviews that can be found on YouTube. I used to hit The Strand on my lunch break to look at photo books and now it’s the first section I hit in any used book store. I think it’s very important to constantly look at good photographs and good photographers’ work. I left Instagram (and now am ironically back for the week on the CMC takeover) almost two years ago for many reasons, but one of them was the constant bombardment of mediocre photography. If you’re constantly viewing okay photographs that receive thousands of likes, you’re training your eye to recognize “this is good” and shaping your view based off the masses, and I personally believe it is better to look at your own work improve by comparing it to what the greats have done (or by recreating their work) rather than following the trend of the day.

What do you think it takes to make a good photograph?

That’s a question I think will have a different answer every few years as I continue to dive into photography, but for this exact moment I think timing is the most important aspect for what it takes to make a good photograph. It could be timing in a lighting sense, especially in landscapes where the color and quality of the light is so important. It can be the moment you click the shutter, waiting for your model to portray the perfect look or subject on the street doing that thing of interest. It can be the right place, right time for any number of scenarios and spending the time out with your camera to be there in the first place. It boils down to being there and grabbing the moment, which is all based on timing. And then we all need a little bit of luck to take it to the next level.