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- My name's Sandro,
I'm a photographer here in Chicago.
I'm a director, photographer, artist,
a lot of commercial work, a lot of big advertising campaigns
I'm an image maker, I'm a visionary and I'm an image maker.
(tribal drum music)
2011, Cannes honored me with the,
Saatchi & Saatchi Best New Director Award
for a short film I did with John Malkovich.
2014, 2015,
I was the IPA Lucie Award,
International Photographer of the Year Award,
which I believe in our business is like the Academy Award,
it's the big one, one of the big ones to get.
But awards are awards,
you can't live on the awards you get, because,
after you win these awards, it's not like you have clients
lined up outside your door waiting to work with you,
you still have to work very, very, very hard,
and they're really nice accomplishments in life,
but they shouldn't define who you are
and what you've done with your career.
And they're just small milestones, I believe,
and I don't think we should live for our awards.
So many of us don't know what war looks like,
because we haven't experienced war.
But through photography we get to learn
what war must feel like, or the epidemic of AIDS or famine.
Most of us don't go through
those very difficult, difficult times,
but through a photograph, we could actually understand
what somebody dying of AIDS is going through.
We feel empathy, we feel a lot of different emotions.
So to me I think people love to be educated,
and photography is a great, great, great educator.
My latest project that I'm really excited about
is this work I'm doing in Papua New Guinea.
You know I've always been curious about the
indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea.
Last year I had a big exhibition in Australia.
I ran into a gentleman there who had been
to Papua New Guinea quite a few times,
and we got to talking, and,
he basically inspired me
that this was the time to go to Papua New Guinea.
So we're off there shooting
these wonderful indigenous tribes.
I wanna shoot them before Western civilization
takes over completely over in Papua New Guinea.
These are tribes that have,
been around for thousands of years,
many of them still,
within their huts are either in grass skirts,
or naked, or just wearing gourds,
and this is something so different than what we have
here in the Western civilization.
And what I really wanted to experience this for myself.
I've seen some great films of Papua New Guinea.
And I feel like it's a dying,
it's a dying population,
and something that probably in years to come
will no longer be here, and I wanna record it,
I wanna experience it, and I wanna record it, myself.
Believe in your idea, and to succeed with your idea,
that it's gonna take more than
what you initially probably thought it was gonna do.
You're not gonna go out and do this project in,
just a couple of days.
If you really wanna nail the project and make it historic,
you gotta give and you gotta go,
and you gotta do it again, and again, and again.
It's the mind, it's your eye, it's your heart,
it's your soul, it's your passion, your idea.
There's so much more involved
than the equipment that you use,
to make it a great, great, great, great picture.
(slow synthesizer melody)