Meet Zave Smith

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Zave Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Zave below.

Zave, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Where do you get your resilience from?

When I was eleven, I went on a winter hike with my Boy Scout troop. At a narrow stretch of trail above a frozen stream, one of the bigger boys tripped me, sending me into the icy water. Back at the cabin, the Scoutmaster—who was also my dad—just looked at me and said, “Go change.” No sympathy, no lecture, no punishment.

Seven years later, I was in Israel when the Yom Kippur War broke out. At eighteen, I joined an infantry brigade of the Israeli Defense Forces. Boot camp taught us two things: never give up, and always improvise. If something broke, you fixed it. If you were tired, hungry, or in pain, you kept moving.
Those lessons have stayed with me.

On a commercial photography set, no matter how well you plan, surprises happen. A CEO who hates being photographed? You make him comfortable. A Creative Director who can’t decide? You help them choose. A client making impossible demands? You step in as an educator.

The real challenge is turning resilience from a trait into a practice—quieting panic and confusion so you can focus on solving problems and creating art. For me, that comes from experience and trust: you’ve been here before, you know what to do. Take a breath, and work it through.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

One of the pleasures of being a portrait photographer has been the wonderful conversations that I have shared with my subjects. For a long time I wondered how to incorporate those experiences into my work. For the last 4 years I started adding an interview into our portrait sessions creating a series of short films.

The first thirty of these interviews with small business owners live on a site we created just for this project called MYBKYD: https://www.mybkyd.com/. Last winter we expanded and started photographing and interviewing artists creating a YouTube Channel called Creative Soul. https://www.youtube.com/@CreativeSouls-i2v

Being a restless creative soul myself. I am always evolving my approach to commercial shoots.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I was not the most talented kid in my art school but I was the most tenacious. I just worked. Saturday night at 3am, I was in my darkroom printing. When an interesting photo opportunity came up, 4 hours away, I jumped into my car and drove.

During the length of my career I reinvested in my practice and in my business. Even when times were hard, I never gave up and continued to pursue new ideas, new methods of working and creating, and new ways of promoting myself. What advice would I give somebody who is just starting out? Love what you do enough that you are willing to grind it out while keeping a very open heart.

BTW, that last sentence about having an open heart is a very important element in success. You have to learn, and for many of us it does not come naturally, to really listen to your clients, to your friends, to your loved ones, and to yourself.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

I am always on the lookout for creative people to share ideas with. Meeting and talking with new people who are passionate about what they do is where I get my juice from. I can be easily reached via my website: www.zavesmith.com

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Image Credits

Zave Smith

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