Florida

Rollins College

Columbia University

Savid grew up in New York, receiving a degree in Behavioral Science from Rollins College. 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, received his Master's in Journalism from Columbia University, then moved to Florida, where he worked for the St. Petersburg Times. He has received grants for his ethnic portraiture work. His work in the Philippines, has won several photographic awards and has been published in American Photo, Aperture, Black andWhite, and Focus magazines. He currently teaches photography at an Arts Center to at-risk children.

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.