Sasha Elage is Paying Attention

Sasha Elage doesn’t speak about photography the way most photographers do. He’s not trying to decode the world or offer a tidy narrative. Instead, the artist describes his practice as playful, instinctive, and driven by pure fascination—with light, with silence, with the shape of wind.

His images carry the softness of memory and the surreal pull of dreams. Yet, for all their ethereal quality, they’re grounded in deep attention. Elage finds magic in parking lots, in basement shadows, and in the way birds move across the sky.

He doesn’t claim to understand life, he’s just grateful to witness it. And in talking with him, I was reminded of something simple and rare: the magic of paying attention.

Below, Elage shares his own words on Ecstasea, the photo series accompanying this profile, and talks with Byline about his photo philosophy.

Ecstasea is an ongoing series shaped under the sun of the French Riviera. It is my quiet attempt to capture something we rarely get to hold: other people’s happiness. It is a fleeting emotion, delicate and pure, seen from afar when the world disappears and joy becomes effortless.

I have always been drawn to moments when people are simply being—swimming, floating, laughing, lost in the sea. There is something sacred in that surrender. I tried with all my humility to photograph it without intrusion, without breaking the spell. Always from a respectful distance. Always taking the best of people and only that.

Today, it has become increasingly difficult to photograph people without staging or stealing. But this is different. The faces are far away. The gaze is soft. What I am looking for is not identity. It is light. It is presence. It is a kind of ecstasy.

The name Ecstasea comes from that fusion. Ecstasy and sea. A state of being where the self dissolves and the body becomes water, sunlight, and motion. I hope the tenderness I felt while making these images lives inside them.

This is not a statement. It is a whisper, a way to say, “Look how beautiful we are when we forget everything and simply float.”

Madeline Montoya: Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about yourself?

Sasha Elage: I’m a photographer, because I use a camera, but I really think I’ve always been a visual artist. As a child, I really didn’t know about the possibility of being a creative photographer. The only thing I understood about photography was that you can do fashion photography or wedding photography, but as for using photography as an expression and as art itself, I was really years away from that. I discovered it at the age of twenty-four.

Now, at forty-five, almost twenty years later, the flame is still here. It’s like I started yesterday. It’s never gonna stop. I feel like I haven’t done anything in photography yet. I’m still at the very, very beginning of surprising myself and discovering everything. It’s just an insatiable hunger for seeing the world through my own eyes.

MM: It sounds like photography helps you understand the world better.

SE: I never really wanted to understand the world. I don’t think there’s anything to understand. It’s just so fun for me.

I’m a complete outsider. I have never been to art school. I never had a mentor. I never studied art. So I do everything by myself and, believe me, I didn’t understand anything about life. It’s fascinating, but there’s nothing to understand about it. We are all lost and pretending to be cool and smart.

Photography just makes me happy. That’s it. It’s kind of selfish, but it also makes other people happy. But I’m the luckiest guy ever. It turns out other people like [my work], but I refuse to intellectualize it, analyze it, and tell people how to think and understand life.

MM: What fascinates you visually?

SE: Surprising myself. Looking at something that’s very boring. I go out of my way to places where there’s nothing, like a parking lot or a basement. I challenge myself by seeing how much time it takes to be fascinated by something, by some detail, by some light, by some shadow. It’s a game.

MM: It’s refreshing to hear you speak about your work with a lightness. It feels like a game and it’s playful, but at the same time feels crafted. When I look at the Magic Island series, it feels like a million things had to fall into place for you to get these beautiful images.

SE: It just comes to me. There’s a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of perseverance. I’m playful, but I’m super serious about it. I’m playing a game, but I want to win.

MM: You don’t seem afraid of making mistakes or experimenting though, like when you were talking about the series, there’s nothing else to shoot. You’re just enjoying and capturing whatever you can. You’re not afraid to try something that doesn’t work.

SE: I’m not afraid of anything, really. I don’t want to spend all my life compromising. I think that, because I never studied photography and never followed the rules, it was very easy for me to break them.

I’m trying to photograph the wind, I’m trying to photograph absence. I’m trying to photograph the difference in the temperature of the water at night. If a river flows into a sea, the refraction of light is different from that of the salty water.

MM: I can’t believe that you’re trying to photograph wind and temperature. How do the senses influence how you perceive what you photograph?

SE: I’m very influenced by music. I like how sometimes you hear some piece of music and it’s just a guitar, like six strings and a piece of wood and metal, and you can cry and you can have feelings and you can think about your grandma or you can think about people that you never met, but you miss already. It’s very weird. And I ask myself, how can we do visual stuff and create emotions and translate what’s inside of us with the camera?

MM: I haven’t spoken to an artist in so long who has such an authentic joy for creating, which, honestly, is so refreshing to hear.

SE: Look at the people we love the most. They never really studied art. So don’t listen to anybody. Just do it yourself. And if it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, nobody cares. You will die, and something else will happen. So it’s not important.

MM: You say that there are more important things in photography and social media. What’s important to you?

SE: Doing photography without a camera and not talking about it to anybody. I do it all the time. Today, I took plenty of photos, but I didn’t have my camera. I didn’t have my phone.

MM: You took photos with what? Just your eyes?

SE: Yeah. So I look at something, I see it and I like it, and then I try to move around to find the perfect frame, and I take the picture in my mind. I’m training myself. It’s like a muscle, like when you go to the gym every day, and then, after a year or two, you become fit. It’s the same thing with photography. It’s like there’s not a single day without photography.

MM: What does seeing mean to you, beyond the physical act of looking?

SE: It’s realizing how insignificant we are, how fragile we are, how small we are, and being able to see something beautiful that nobody pays attention to. It’s like paying tribute to life, to the things that are above us. It’s like somebody giving you a beautiful smile in the subway in New York. You don’t know the person. You’ll never see him again. But he was here. He saw you, you saw him, and he made your existence less horrible and a little bit more bearable.

MM: As a personal fan, I have to ask about the horses. What’s it like interacting with them? What was that process like? How did you find them?

SE: It was my first trip to Iceland, maybe five years ago. I went with my wife. And there were a lot of horses on the road. So I kept stopping the car to take photos of them, and then posted some online, which were massively shared. People perceived them as unicorns or dream creatures, or something out of this world. Then I came back to Iceland and lived there for a month. And after living there for a month, in the middle of nowhere, we said, let’s do another month. The horses were twenty miles away from where we lived, but I visited them every day.

It was December. It was super cold, super windy, super snowy, and super dark. And every day I had to go and see the horses. And my wife was like, “What’s happening with the horses?” And I said, “I don’t know. I’m obsessed with them and they’re obsessed with me.” There’s nobody there, but they were all coming to me, and they all wanted to pose; they were never running away from the flash. We became friends. It’s an unexplainable obsession, and how the Magic Island series was born. I was talking with my wife and I said, “Listen, I feel like these horses are getting out of control.” They’re everywhere. I go to some airport, and there’s a girl with her iPad, and her screensaver is my horse. And then I go somewhere, and the horse is on somebody’s phone or somebody’s T-shirt. So it doesn’t belong to me anymore.

MM: I believe that the horses are everywhere. Have you ever seen something that felt too intimate to photograph?

SE: I always try to deeply respect people and animals and everything that’s alive, so I would never be taking pictures of somebody or something that can make somebody uncomfortable. Even when I did the photo series Ecstasea, you can see people swimming in the water, but you don’t really see their faces. I always try to preserve dignity and respect. They can feel that I love what I photograph. I don’t believe you can photograph something you hate. There needs to be love and respect, and empathy. That’s very important. I have a lot of photos that I would never show to anybody.

MM: If you could give one way of seeing to the world, what would it be?

SE: Just to look at the beauty. There are so many beautiful things around, like when I was taking pictures of starlings. People love these photos, but when I was photographing the birds dancing in the sky, nobody was watching them.

Everybody was asking me, why are you photographing them? They shit on our cars. Really? These birds have been here for millions of years. It’s you parking your car below them. So just look at the beauty. Look at the beauty of life. Look at the beauty of a reflection of the sunset in the water. Look at the shadows when you go to the subway. There’s so much beauty around, and we don’t see it.