Naomi McKenzie
Onespace Gallery
Exhibition Catalogue
2024
Backyard sprinkler, rockpools, biting sun, sprouting pineapple top. There’s a literary quality to Naomi McKenzie’s work. Exercising the same perceptual salience as that found in a Tim Winton novel, she weaves the interpersonal with the weathered, prehistoric beauty of the Australian landscape. Her eye is cultivated and alert to temporal wonders. Refreshingly free from contemporary visual trends and steeped in photographic history, when I first saw McKenzie's work, I found the stars of twentieth-century photography winking back at me—the sensuality of Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham’s still lifes; the familial intimacy of Sally Mann; the shadow play in Olive Cotton's photography; the smart composition of Toni Schneiders—all wrapped up in an antipodean sensibility.
Although an emerging artist on paper, McKenzie’s expertise tells a different story. Her arrival is long in the making, and she has been practicing with conviction for years. She was raised in regional Victoria, surrounded by hot, flat, expansive farmland bathed in dramatic lighting and natural abstractions. It was an optical playground for a young artist. Her father was a photography hobbyist and a member of the local camera club, methodically documenting their family life. When she was only seven years old, McKenzie was invited to his darkroom, and initiated into the alchemical magic of photography. She was hooked. Her father became her greatest supporter and encouraged McKenzie to pursue art seriously, leading her to win a graduate scholarship to study photography after high school. Her natural aptitude for the technical landed her in photo labs for twelve years, where she worked for Fujifilm through the transition from analogue to digital. But her heart was always with the former. McKenzie eventually left commercial labs to continue honing her skill in analogue processes, installing her own darkroom at home and undertaking selfdirected learning from thereon. In this male-dominated discipline, she was able to invert the status quo and overcome stubbornly internalised pressures to ‘keep up with the boys’, proving herself as adept at the technical rigours of the medium as she is at the artistic.
McKenzie is a ‘photographer’s photographer’. She cares as much about the process as the end result, and she handles film with impressive fluency. Her favourite black-and-white developer is an eco-friendly update of an antiquated formula, made by a bespoke photochemist in the UK. Her most prized camera is a Hasselblad, which she had dreamed of owning since childhood, because—in her own words—“it’s the camera that we took to the moon, and that made the first image looking back at Earth from space”. Most of the photographs in Where We Meet have been shot with this profound technology. No matter how many times we recast and evolve the camera, when I hear the word ‘photography’, I think of pictures that look like McKenzie’s: made of light, chemicals, and hardy mechanics. The primacy of these materials makes them trustworthy and grounding companions amid the frenzy of our current imageobsessed environment.
Although an emerging artist on paper, McKenzie’s expertise tells a different story. Her arrival is long in the making, and she has been practicing with conviction for years. She was raised in regional Victoria, surrounded by hot, flat, expansive farmland bathed in dramatic lighting and natural abstractions. It was an optical playground for a young artist. Her father was a photography hobbyist and a member of the local camera club, methodically documenting their family life. When she was only seven years old, McKenzie was invited to his darkroom, and initiated into the alchemical magic of photography. She was hooked. Her father became her greatest supporter and encouraged McKenzie to pursue art seriously, leading her to win a graduate scholarship to study photography after high school. Her natural aptitude for the technical landed her in photo labs for twelve years, where she worked for Fujifilm through the transition from analogue to digital. But her heart was always with the former. McKenzie eventually left commercial labs to continue honing her skill in analogue processes, installing her own darkroom at home and undertaking selfdirected learning from thereon. In this male-dominated discipline, she was able to invert the status quo and overcome stubbornly internalised pressures to ‘keep up with the boys’, proving herself as adept at the technical rigours of the medium as she is at the artistic.
McKenzie is a ‘photographer’s photographer’. She cares as much about the process as the end result, and she handles film with impressive fluency. Her favourite black-and-white developer is an eco-friendly update of an antiquated formula, made by a bespoke photochemist in the UK. Her most prized camera is a Hasselblad, which she had dreamed of owning since childhood, because—in her own words—“it’s the camera that we took to the moon, and that made the first image looking back at Earth from space”. Most of the photographs in Where We Meet have been shot with this profound technology. No matter how many times we recast and evolve the camera, when I hear the word ‘photography’, I think of pictures that look like McKenzie’s: made of light, chemicals, and hardy mechanics. The primacy of these materials makes them trustworthy and grounding companions amid the frenzy of our current imageobsessed environment.
McKenzie’s practice catalysed when she became a mother to two sons. Just when she thought she’d outpaced the boys, a couple more arrived to keep her on her toes. Perhaps in a subconscious nod to her father, McKenzie turned to her camera to help make sense of this new territory. These photographs became a series titled Ex Tenebris Lux, which saw her wrestling with the private discomforts that frequented those early years of motherhood. The work spoke of isolation and was tinged with a uniquely Australian suburban pathos. Where We Meet expands upon this formative work and we find McKenzie in a moment of rediscovery and renewed vitality. Play, risk, curiosity, vulnerability, brevity, and chance all converge here. These images call to mind the luminous visual world of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, where there is redemption in sensitive observation.
McKenzie is attentive to the creative force that animates her body, her children, and the natural environment surrounding them. Through her eyes, we can see how tightly knit the experience of motherhood and artist really are. The mutually creative spirit of these identities render the everyday as mysterious, potent, and infinitely surprising in equal measure. In the words of Susan Sontag, “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own”. Capturing fleeting, intimate moments with such precision and elegance is a triumph. Years of practice has allowed McKenzie to tame the often ungovernable mediating effects of the camera, and allowed an uninterrupted poetic expression to take shape. These photographs dignify the mundane and add much-needed dimension to the flat curation of family life and childhood circulating our popular discourse. In her skilled hands, the vernacular ‘family snap’ becomes a poignant reflection on childhood, parenting, and sense of place—where pictorial potential is alive in everything.
McKenzie is attentive to the creative force that animates her body, her children, and the natural environment surrounding them. Through her eyes, we can see how tightly knit the experience of motherhood and artist really are. The mutually creative spirit of these identities render the everyday as mysterious, potent, and infinitely surprising in equal measure. In the words of Susan Sontag, “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own”. Capturing fleeting, intimate moments with such precision and elegance is a triumph. Years of practice has allowed McKenzie to tame the often ungovernable mediating effects of the camera, and allowed an uninterrupted poetic expression to take shape. These photographs dignify the mundane and add much-needed dimension to the flat curation of family life and childhood circulating our popular discourse. In her skilled hands, the vernacular ‘family snap’ becomes a poignant reflection on childhood, parenting, and sense of place—where pictorial potential is alive in everything.
Naomi McKenzie
Outer Shell
2024