255 - Mackenzie Calle

Mackenzie Calle is a freelance documentary photographer and National Geographic Explorer based in Brooklyn. In 2024, she was awarded first prize in the World Press Photo Open Format category award (North & Central America) for her project the Gay Space Agency, and was a finalist for the Sony World Photography Awards.

She was selected as a Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Fellow in 2022. That same year, she was named one of the Lenscratch 25 to Watch and was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant. In 2023, she was named as a Lens Culture Emerging Talent Award winner and received the Dear Dave Fellowship.

Mackenzie is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in Cinema Studies and was awarded the Director’s Fellowship to attend ICP’s Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism Program. She was selected to Eddie Adams Workshop class XXXV. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. Prior to her freelance career, she was a photo producer at NBC Universal. 

Her work has been exhibited at Fotografiska Stockholm, Photoville, Pride Photo Festival, and Noorderlicht International Photo Festival. 

Clients include National Geographic, The Washington Post, GAYLETTER, Discovery, MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal. 

In episode 255, Mackenzie discusses, among other things:

• Winning the WPP open category
• Tangible and intagible benefits of winning
• Her journey to photography
• How the idea for the Gay Space Agency came about
• How she set about making images to tell the story
• The goal to disseminate the story as widely as possible
• Her experience of doing the Eddie Adams Workshop
• Letting the story tell her what it wants
• Experimentation being the fun part
• Her love of sport...
• ...and TV

Referenced:

• Sally Ride
• Francis French
• Billie Jean King
• Christina De Middel
• Erika Larson

Website | Instagram

“For me, it’s letting the story tell me what it needs. So it’s not so much going in with a preconceived notion. You obviously go into most stories with some idea of what you’re going to do, but every idea I have, that work in itself almost reveals or tells me kind of what it should be. So sometimes that means fiction, sometimes that does mean straight photojournalism, sometimes that means entirely imagined and staged projects…”

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