BIO.:

Savid grew up in New York and received a degree in Behavioral Science from Rollins College in 1976. He worked in an orphanage in Germany, a pub in Ireland and crewed on a charter sailboat in the Caribbean before serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Philippines for two years. He briefly attended Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, then received his Master's in Journalism from Columbia University in 1982 and moved to Florida, where he worked for the St. Petersburg Times until 1986. He has received grants for his ethnic portraiture work and his work in the Philippines, has won several photographic awards and has been published in American Photo, Aperture, Black and White, and Focus magazines. He currently teaches photography at The Arts Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, and to at-risk children through the Pinellas County Youth Arts Corp program.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT:

Anxious, bored and unemployed after graduate school, I set up a darkroom in the bathroom of a tiny NYC apartment. It was only a chemistry experiment to kill time. I wanted to see if a print would develop if I followed all the steps in an old Time-Life photography book I had found on a garbage heap while walking home from the subway one evening. From there, my photography became driven by the need for self-expression. For me, it is all about emotion: the print that emerges in the darkness must hit me in the stomach when the lights come on. Since childhood, photography has fascinated me. I find the camera a unique tool capable of transforming an ephemeral and often unseen moment of human life into a timeless image with a spirit beyond its two-dimensional silence.