We recently connected with Kenzie Maroney and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kenzie, thanks for joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
In the freelance creative world I feel like being successful is almost always different for each person. It very much depends on what your own goals are and how far you’re willing to go to achieve them. But, I’m a firm believer that if you put in the work, you’re passionate, you have a good work ethic and you love what you do then you’re on the right track to being successful. In the freelance world you never really know what you’re going to get; sometimes you’ll be busy one month and slow the next, but you can’t let the amount of money you make or how many photoshoots (or whatever your crafts is) you’re doing be the deciding factor on if you’re successful. While it’s hard not to look at it that way sometimes, for me the best way I’ve gone about looking at my own success and realizing what it takes is seeing how far I’ve come. Looking at the bigger picture and seeing how much personal and artistic growth I’ve made in the 6 years I’ve been doing freelance work. Once you know and see that, and can be proud of yourself for it, I think you’re on the right track to being successful.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
My name is Kenzie and I’m a full-time freelance studio photographer based in Nashville, TN. I started doing photography when I was a freshman in high school using the macro setting on my parents point and shoot camera to get better depth of field. I also learned about black & white film photography, developing all my own film and prints in the darkroom, but quickly realized I was much more interested in digital photography; in other words, I’ve always loved seeing the results as I’m shooting. After a few high school level photography classes I discovered my love for this art form and knew I wanted to go to college for it and so I kept on learning it. One of the things that made me gravitate towards it the most is that it felt easy to me. In school I was never good at math, science, history or subjects like that, but with art/photography it just clicked. I looked forward to it every day, and I was always thinking about it. So I took every single high school photography class that I could in 4 years, ( 5 of them to be exact) and then I was off to art school for college in Nashville.
My time in college was some that I wish I could do all over again, because I loved it that much. I was so at home so quickly, it was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. This small private art school (Watkins College of Art) was a place, a community, filled with people both students and professors just like me. 95 % of the classes we took were art based, and the school was so small that you built real relationships not only with your classmates, but also with the professors. Being a project based school for most classes we were assigned a new project every 2 weeks. We were given a prompt or general topic to create art about and then it was up to us to decide what we wanted to do and how we planned on doing it. Once it was due we went through as a class and discussed/critiqued every person’s project. While that all sounds fairly simple, it taught me what it means to be conceptual and very purposeful with my work, as well as how to take & give critique. Art school helped me navigate life in a different way, it helped me find myself both as an artist and an individual. It showed me how to dig deep, that its okay to be emotional especially with art, what it feels like to be proud of something you’ve created, and most importantly it showed me what its like to have people who support you to no end, and are always in your corner because they understand you for you.
Which brings me to why I do what I do today. Being a photographer of people means that it’s my job to capture a still moment of a person in their truest form. As their most authentic self. I have to be able to learn about this person usually within minutes of meeting them and use my craft to show everyone else who they are. To make it even more raw ( and or challenging depending how you look at it ) I do it by taking them out of any sort of environment and place them in front of a single colored backdrop with a massive flash going off every few seconds. Then, I go about my ways of getting each person to slowly open up. Most times you can see as the photoshoot goes on the subject gets more comfortable ( and so do I ), they begin to loosen up and realize its not as intimidating as it seems! For me specifically the trick is to move fairly quickly, not in a rushed way, just making sure I as the photographer don’t pause too often and loose the momentum, while I tell my clients to just “keep moving” as well. Focusing less on the actual pose for each specific shot and more on capturing ALL of it, because more often than not candids are some of the best images, even in a studio setting… and then I’ll go back and fine tune some of the posing once I see what we’ve gotten.
Studio photographers in my opinion are fairly hard to come by in Nashville, not everyone does it and not everyone has a space to do it. I’ve been fortunate enough to have built my own studio space for the past 4 years. I have worked hard to maintain a name for myself in a city where there are quite a few photographers, but also knowing it’s not at all a competition! I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I’ve found my niche. People are able to look at my work and know I took it before they see my name attached to it. My style of photography is very simple. It’s minimal, bright, crisp, and to the point. I’m the type of person that if I can get away with a one light setup and get the result I want I’d rather do it that way. So, not only is my work very minimalist my process is too, but in a good way! Ha I’ve also have to be able to be conceptual on the spot. Clients may come to me with ideas or things they want to try and sometimes clients leave it entirely up to me, so my creative juices flow and I get to it. Either way is fun for me, but I really love getting people a bit out of their comfort zone during shoots, even if its something as simple as a bright backdrop color they wouldn’t have picked themselves. Those always end up being some of the best shots!
No matter what I’m always there to give my clients something that they will be excited about when they see the final results and its always to rewarding as a creative when that happens!
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Social media and word of mouth! While the social media scene has obviously drastically changed over the past few years and it’s a bit harder to promote your work that way, it still does the job for the most part. As well as word of mouth being a big part of how I’ve built my clientele. A friend of a friend referred someone to me or someone saw a photo on Instagram they liked and I took it, so they reach out. Both are probably equally as effective for me at this point. When it comes to the social media side of building my clientele though its a lot about just remembering to post my work because I like it, not because it’ll get a lot of attention or likes. Social media is hard right now especially because you never know what you’re going to get out of it. Which I guess just dives even more into that idea of freelance work and not knowing how it’ll be! Ha For me though I stay on top of it, posting when I want to and having an account solely for my photography work. I joke that its become my new mini website, and in a way that’s exactly what it is, a place for people to go and see exactly what I do. My clientele has definitely grown more in the past 6 months and do think that’s because of social media. I’ve gained more new clients because of clients I’ve worked with for years posting shoots we’ve done and then new clients doing the same thing which gets me more new clients… its the snowball effect really. Just multiple little squares of exposure on different sides of social media that help promote my business, which is pretty cool if you think about it!
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
Hmmm, that’s kind of a loaded question, but one I’d like to answer because I’ve been around so many non-creatives in my life. Being a creative is literally saying to yourself (and your family) “I’m interested in pursuing this specific abstract thing and I have no idea if I’ll make it or if it’ll break me, but I’m going to try anyways.” Then you take the leap, and either they support you or they don’t. ( I do have that support )! It’s actually really scary at first, because you’re just hoping it works out somewhere down the road, but you don’t know if that’ll be in 6 months or 6 years. You go through life exploring and pursuing this passion you have for this craft and most of the time there’s no one there to tell you how to do it. I went to 4 years of college and got my Bachelors in Fine Art in Photography, and I remember looking at my professor a few months before graduating and asking her, “Are people going to know I went to school for this?” and she looked me in the eyes and said, “They’ll know.” She was right. Whether people consciously know it or not, if they ask me I obviously love talking about it. But for the people who struggle to understand the journey or just the straight up fact that there are strictly creatives out there, we are doing our best to make it in a world that doesn’t always strive to understand art of any kind. Yes is it a job, yes we are able to make a living off of it, and yes most of the time its a lot of work, its not always easy but if you’re lucky enough to know a creative ask them about their journey or even just their craft, cause I bet they’d absolutely love to explain it to you!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mackenziemaroney.squarespace.com
- Instagram: @kenz.ington_studio @kenziee.maroneyy