We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Aaron Mckenzie a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Aaron thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

As the photographer Mario Sorrenti has put it, the most important thing is to figure out what you want to express, what you want to say next. What do you believe in? Who are you? What is your image? To be a successful photographer, you have to have a unique point of view, and while someone else can teach you how to frame a shot, they can’t give you a point of view. We have to discover that for ourselves, and it took me a while to develop that point of view. I’m still developing it.

My development as a photographer has been, as much as anything, a process of asking myself, “Can I help other people see what I’m seeing right now, feel what I’m feeling right now?” In 2014, I had the great good fortune of moving to San Pedro, California, the harbor area of Los Angeles. LA is not what I’d call a beautiful city, but it’s endlessly photogenic and San Pedro is a high-concentrate distillation of this. It has the container ships and the bridges and the lighthouses, and old warehouses from the pre-container days. Most of the longshoreman dive bars are long gone but the old port town vibe remains if you know where to look. We’re also blessed with canyons and shoreline that give us a natural balance to the industrial harbor side of town. San Pedro is, for me, the most visually rich part of Los Angeles and it’s what inspired me to pick up a camera and try to capture the scenes that were stirring certain emotions in me.

I’ve always been a half-hearted student (at best) but when I set my mind to learning something, I’m not easily defeated. For whatever reason, I woke up on Thanksgiving morning in 2018 and decided that I was going to learn how to really shoot photos that satisfied me, even if no one else ever saw them. So I got up at dawn, grabbed a little Canon point-and-shoot camera that a friend had loaned me, walked out my front door, and just started walking and shooting. I did this every day for years: shooting, coming back and culling photos in Lightroom, learning about what worked and didn’t, and then doing it again the next day. Youtube, Udemy, and photography forums filled in a lot of knowledge gaps along the way. Of course, I wish I’d started this process earlier, but again, maybe my eye just needed that time to mature so that it was ready to see what’s in front of the lens.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Depending on the day and the project, my work can be classified as commercial, editorial, documentary, or fine art. One day, I’ll be shooting images for a brand’s campaign, while the next day I might be shooting a feature for a magazine like Road & Track, or prepping prints for a gallery show. What binds it all together is that I’m focused not merely on portraying an object or a product, but on creating, in a single frame, an entire story that enables the viewer to imagine what came just before and just after that moment. And for a commercial product, that viewer should be able to imagine themselves in that story and say, “Yes, I want to be part of that world.”

But showing up and doing this work at a high level is only part of the bargain: we must also be even-keeled, adaptable, and able to handle the stress of shifting client demands, unpredictable weather, and leading teams toward a common goal. One of the greatest compliments I can receive – alongside praise for the work itself – is when a client chooses to work with me year after year, both because we’re creating work that makes everyone proud, helps achieve sales and revenue, and because we’ve all enjoyed the process of getting to that point. The goal is not to avoid disagreements along the way – those are inevitable – but rather to work through those disagreements in a way that leaves the work and everyone involved in making it feeling better about the process and the relationship.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I often hear people say, “Oh, I’m not creative” just because they’re not writers or poets or photographers, as though daily life isn’t itself a series of creative decisions. Laying out the plumbing for a new house isn’t creative? Figuring out a better way to teach math to seven-year-olds isn’t creative? Working up a menu for a dinner party isn’t creative? If you’re putting something new into the world that wasn’t there before, or using your wits to solve a problem – especially if it’s not in some paint-by-numbers way – you are, by definition, creating. You might even be an artist and didn’t even know it.

Speaking only for myself, I doubt that being an “artist” gives me any unique insight into the world above and beyond simply being me. Each and every human is shaped by a singular collection of experiences, interests, aspirations, and fears, and I hesitate to divide the world into “creatives” and “non-creatives.” One difference I might point to, however, is this: I try to take my fears and emotions and foibles and process them via my creative work. Not every artist does this, but I don’t know many non-artists who do it.

Ever since our earliest ancestors came down out of the trees and onto the savannah of East Africa, we’ve been coming up with creative solutions to this challenge of being human. We’re a fundamentally creative species, living in a world that requires improvisation and real-time adaptation to ever-changing circumstances. Once in a while, one of us manages to design the cathedral at Chartres or paint “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” but all of us, every day, are performing countless creative acts without even stopping to realize it.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I’m an insatiable reader and I’m constantly in the middle of 3-4 different books at any given time. Here are a few that I’ve found invaluable in my own journey:

Those of us creating visual art should know the traditions in which we’re working. I never went to art school, so books like “Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling,” by Gillian McIver have proven invaluable.

When I work with commercial clients to tell their brand’s story, I often find myself going back to “Building a StoryBrand,” by Donald Miller, which uses the tools of storytelling and screenwriting to create marketing messages that actually resonate with viewers and address their core concerns rather than merely interrupting them as they’re trying to watch something else.

And, finally, like most artists, I don’t always want to think about the business side of this industry, but ignoring financial and operational realities torpedoes so many artists’ chances of success in this very unstable line of work. So do yourself a favor and read books like “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz so that you’ll be better positioned for those inevitable downturns.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aaronmckenzie.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronwmckenzie

Image Credits

Images courtesy of Aaron McKenzie