Sam Guest Documents Travels in Haunting Photographs

At just 20 years old, Sam Guest has already traveled the world, had his own T-shirt company, and exhibited photographs in an East End gallery.

The young Sag Harbor artist graduated from in 2009. Guest earned the coveted $10,000 Reutershan Trust art scholarship and began his studies at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan that fall, but he yearned for a different kind of experience.

While he seemingly enjoyed his first year at Parsons, and will return there as a sophomore this fall, Guest decided to take a year off and travel the world with his good friend and 2009 graduate Jasper Creegan.

The two friends left in September and returned in May. Among their adventures, Guest and Creegan researched lions for conservation and taught schoolchildren in Kenya, they saw the Great Pyramids and Luxor in Egypt, worked on a Kibbutz in Israel, stayed and meditated at an ashram in India, and trekked in the Himalayas in Nepal. All the while, Guest took hundreds of medium-format photographs with his Mamiya 7 camera.

in Water Mill included six of those photos in a group show this summer. It is Guest’s first exhibition outside of the school environment, and he was thrilled with the results.

“I was very pleased with the photos we picked,” Guest said, noting that he and Hamaekers had differing opinions on what to show, but the collaboration helped him see the quality in images he might have otherwise overlooked. “We came to a good middle ground,” he said.

The images included one of a Kenyan schoolboy standing beneath an overcast sky after a game of soccer, an Eerie Vietnamese train station, red curtains in a dark hotel room, a foggy night in an unnamed town, a lean shirtless young man prone on the desert sand and a stray, likely sick dog sleeping in a place too clean and ordered for its countenance.

Guest said he found the amount of great subject matter abroad almost overwhelming. “I didn’t have to go looking for the photograph,” he said, comparing it to what was often a different experience in Sag Harbor.

Despite his age and the digital culture in which he was raised, Guest shot all of his pictures in film. “I just love the look, the feel, the graininess of film,” he said, noting that digital photographs can feel almost painterly, while film holds on to the stark reality as only a photograph can. “It’s what I started with,” Guest added, recalling that his aunt Sheralyn Bruss bought him an old Nikon F camera years ago. “That was a great gift,” he said.

Guest had his first brush with artistic success as a teen when he started his own T-Shirt company, called Tribute. He sold the shirts in a number of boutique stores and to private customers, but Guest said exhibiting his photography is much different than selling his clothing designs. “This is much more personal, which I’ve never really dealt with before,” he said. “My photographs are very important to me.”

Sam Guest’s photographs are still on view at Lon Hamaekers Gallery in the Water Mill Ateliers Art Center, located at 903 Montauk Highway in Water Mill.