>>One of the things that got me into photography when I first started was realizing that with a camera and a small amount of skill, you could go to any show for free at the 930 Club when I couldn't afford to.

So I learned that if I found a publication willing to run my photos, I could kind of come in with a camera and bring a friend.

It seemed like a pretty good deal.

My name is Sanjay Suchak and I'm a photographer here in Charlottesville.

You know, I sort of work in three different areas.

One of them is a, as a music photographer.

So my work appears in Rolling Stone or with different artists and their publicity photos, album covers.

The other is I do a lot of political protest photography that appears in museums, the Washington Post and New York Times.

And then the third is I do a lot of commercial photography.

I had already worked for the Dave Matthews man for many years as in a video capacity, but during a concert for Charlottesville, Stevie Wonder came out to do the last song Superstition and him and Dave were holding hands and talking to the crowd.

And I had kept a camera on my hip, probably to the ire of the video director, sorry, Mike, and they were talking so long, I just put down the camera that I was behind them and took this photo, ended up printing a couple copies and giving 'em to Dave.

And shortly thereafter, I became one of the band's photographers.

I never really envisioned a career in that, but over the years, being in Charlottesville, crossing paths with members of the band and then getting to know other people in the music community, I've sort of created a pretty large career out of working for the musicians, and it's been pretty great.

You know, besides Dave Matthews Band, I work a a lot with Slightly Stoopid and Public Enemy.

And in addition to photography, I still dabble in the concert video area.

So I'm currently serving as Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats video director on their tour.

It's been a lot of fun.

The variety that I get to experience.

From 2013 to 2023, I was the senior photographer for the University of Virginia.

For those 10 years, when I wasn't on the road with Dave Matthews Band, I was really putting every spare hour I had into going onto grounds and finding out what was happening, documenting every bit of the day-to-day life at the university, from athletics to marketing, going into interesting classes, the research that faculty are doing, and also telling the story of the history of that sort of impressive behemoth of an organization.

So that was a lot of fun to learn a lot about a school that I did not attend and become part of the family there, and I'm very proud of that work.

So my interest in the monument situation, it started with the 2017 protest in Charlottesville, and at that point I was the staff photographer for the University.

And, you know, I went down to the law on the night that the Nazis came up the lawn and witnessed all that, photographed all of that, and it sort of made the issue personal for me.

And the next day also covering everything that happened there and the tragedy that happened there.

Just by happenstance and happening to know people from other projects at UVA, I ended up becoming friends with the contractor who eventually got the contract to remove all the statues.

And so I joined on with their crew as a photographer, documenting that, not for a news outlet, although it did eventually get published in the New York Times in a large piece.

But for me as a way to document the inside story of how all these statues came down.

And that culminated with being one of two photographers who was granted access to the melting of the Charlottesville Lee statue, which was closing the book on a pretty painful chapter for me and a lot of other people in the community.

In the year and a half before the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond was removed, I spent a lot of time in Marcus- David Peters Circle in Richmond, documenting how it became sort of a community center.

And one of the photos that I really am proud of is this drone photo.

It just sort of shows the pedestal with all the graffiti and the, you know, additional art, and then the statue above, and there's bird poop on his head.

And it's sort of abstract enough that it appears to people as art.

And then if you look at it longer, it's more of a journalism piece.

And so this is an artist proof, and I have five prints, and I think at this point, three of them have sold to major museums.

I think that if you have an interest in photography, especially photojournalism or journalism, that it's more critical than ever that you think about getting into that career.

There's AI, there's all sorts of fake news out there, but, you know, we need more people now that are willing to talk about their specialty and honestly report on what's happening in the world so we stay informed.

A democracy is strong when the citizenry are informed.

So after I made the decision that it was time to move on from being the university photographer, I settled on a position with the Karsh Institute of Democracy as a practicing fellow in democracy.

And what that means is I was an educator.

I led panel discussions and furthered my research into the topic of memorialization of monuments.

What happens next with these statues?

What happens next with the idea of memory?

And how do we memorialize someone's admirable traits without necessarily showing them as a person and putting them into bronze and stone?

I became a photographer sort of by accident.

You know, the old, "your hobby becomes your job."

I always liked photography.

I learned from my mother and in college I really enjoyed taking photos.

But you know, being the son of a first generation immigrant, you're not gonna going to necessarily declare that you're going to go to college for art.

So I went to school for business in international relations and decided to forge a path in government.

All the while I was taking photos and learning from different people and just dabbling in it on the weekends, evenings where I could gain entry into doing things.

I would say the, the first image that sort of advanced my career was just this picture of DuPont Circle in DC I took at night.

It was sort of gloomy and there were people walking in cars and it somehow got picked for an art show in DC and then added to the collection of the DC Public Library in terms of their images.

I found that I was having more success with photography than what I actually went to school for; that the rewards were more noticeable, and not just financially, but just in terms of people connecting with what you do and appreciating what you're putting out there.

And it sort of felt like this was going to be my natural path.

I let my dad do my taxes so he understands I'm not gonna starve.

Thankfully, I have a good home life where it's understood that this is my job and this is how I earn my living.

And so when I'm home, I try to be intensely home and more present.

A lot of the photography that I do, especially the music centric stuff, is you're living it.

You're gone weeks on end.

You know, the day starts at 6:00 AM and it ends at two in the morning, and then you wake up after four hours and you do it all over again, and it's your whole life for that.

You don't have to think about anything else other than your job there.

And so it can get a little exhausting and tedious at times.

And my partner is really good at, she's good at reminding me that I should stop and appreciate the cool stuff that I get to do.

It's been great to start to think about that and try to be more mindful of that.

You know, a couple weeks ago I was on the stage at Madison Square Garden.

We had just done a benefit, the Soul Shine benefit, and I was trying to arrange this big family photo, which is sort of like herding cats a little bit.

You know, 20, 30 musicians on stage.

And I realized that all of them, you know, I was pretty much friends with all of them and it was like, this is kind of cool to be standing up there and you know, my friends on the video team put my face on the live stream, so my phone was buzzing in my pocket from my parents.

And other people were like, I see you on stage at Madison Square Garden.

My advice to someone who wants to become a photographer or artist would be to specialize in one thing from the start.

Try to become really good at one thing.

If you're like taking photos of horses or cars or sports, focus on that.

Get really good and known for that in your community, and people will presume automatically if you're really good at that one thing, you're good at anything.

And then you can figure out how to do that later.

The second piece of advice I have would be that the myth of the full-time artist is a modern invention.

Most of the great artists of the world also had other jobs, you know, patent clerk, post office, Andy Warhol did store window designs.

And the third tip that I have would be ask questions.

If you find somebody who's doing something you want to do, ask them for advice because everyone is very happy to usually share their secrets.

And if you need to warm up someone a little bit, just ask 'em what the secret to their success is and they won't say no.

I've never had anyone say no.

I'm inspired, obviously by other photographers.

Robert Frank and Richard Avedon are some of my favorite photographers.

Robert LeBlanc has published a book on the Pentecostal Holiness Churches of West Virginia.

Those are the ones with the snakes, and he published this book and printed it as a Bible.

Seeing stuff like that really gets my wheels turning about what I can do differently.

I think any creative person, photographer, artist, musician, you know, no one's ever quite right where they want to be.

There's always somewhere better that you're trying to aspire to.

And if you only focus on that, you'll be pretty miserable.

And not focusing on what you have achieved, like what's in the rear view mirror.

And I'm not saying live in the past, but look at what's in the rear view mirror.

Success isn't linear necessarily either.

And when good things start happening, they will start happening more frequently, and that's not a coincidence.

My dream gig, I think would be to be Bruce Springsteen's photographer.

That would be pretty great.

Or I'd like to be a White House photographer.

I think that that's given my background in politics, being in the front row, seat to decisions being made would be pretty interesting.