Michael Sasser Interview
“Boudoir didn’t show them
what they already knew,
it showed them something new”
This week, I had the privilege of sitting down with Michael Sasser of Sasser Stills Boudoir located in Los Angeles, California. Michael is an award-winning photographer, known for his celebrity boudoir, photographer education, as well as his YouTube channel which boasts over 149,000 subscribers. When he doesn’t have a camera in-hand, Michael enjoys tennis, being outdoors in the California sun, and organizing his house. He also recently earned his pilot’s license and enjoys taking his friends on helicopter rides when he finds the time. In 2006, the day before leaving to studying abroad in Australia, he bought his first point-and-shoot camera to document his trip. When he got back to where he was staying and brought the photos up on his computer, he noticed that the sunsets and flowers he captured, didn’t look like the beautiful ones he saw in real life. Michael explains, “I was like ‘this is not nearly as beautiful as the way I saw it, what am I doing wrong? How do I make it the way I saw it?’ So I started reading photography magazines. I’d go to a train station and buy two or three magazines, and read them on the train ride up; I’d read them on the train ride back. And that’s how I learned most of my photography in the beginning.” He goes on to say, “I got back in town, I was still really interested in it so I got a nicer camera. I started taking pictures of people and got my first photography job taking pictures of children’s sports photography. It was tough, but I enjoyed it…. I shot 12-15 hour days making ten bucks an hour, I mean, it was a dream. It was a literal dream, and then I realized I wasn’t making enough money doing that, you know, ten bucks an hour wasn’t going to change my life. So I learned to shoot portraits, started getting my own clients and shooting weddings. One thing led to another, and I wound up shooting boudoir and realized how much more I connected to that than a wedding day.”
“The big difference, to me, between boudoir and wedding photography is a lot of photography is a memory. It’s like ‘oh yeah, I remember when we went on that trip’, or ‘oh yeah, I remember that’s the way you looked when you were ten years old’, ‘I remember on the wedding day we were happy, that reminds me of how happy we were’. I think that’s a beautiful piece of photography, but I found that with boudoir it ended up changing perspectives. Somebody would come in seeing themselves one way, and when they would see their pictures they would now see themselves in a new way. Boudoir didn’t show them what they already knew, it showed them something new. And I was really fascinated by this, that I had some sort of power to alter somebody’s view of themselves or the way they move through the world.”
Something almost every photographer knows is the fated ‘Impostor Syndrome’. Michael explains, “Yeah, I deal with impostor syndrome, absolutely. I think it’s a myth that people don’t. A lot of the people who are high achievers are there because they feel impostor syndrome- it’s a fear of not being good enough that makes them want to achieve. If you talk to a lot of top performers, they’re usually burdened by something that says that they’re not good enough, and they’re fighting that. And the proof that they are good enough is their success. For some people that’ll never be enough and they’ll always continue to grow.” He goes on to say, “What we do is we don’t try to be seen, so that we can’t be found out.” Impostor syndrome isn’t exclusive to novice artists. Michael explains that as recent as this past year, he experienced a fear of failure when releasing his ‘Double your Poses, Double Your Funds’ course. Even after his Facebook group told him they wanted to see more posing courses from him, or his over hundred thousand YouTube subscribers thanking him for sharing his knowledge, he still doubted himself and struggled with releasing the course. “I did the photoshoots, and then for six months I didn’t touch them. I could have, but I pretty much didn’t. Because I was like ‘once I put this out, then I’ll know if people even cared or not’. But if I didn’t put it out then I didn’t really have to address it.” He says.
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