A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

255 - Mackenzie Calle

Apr 23, 2025

Mackenzie Calle is a freelance documentary photographer and National Geographic Explorer based in Brooklyn, renowned for her award-winning project, the Gay Space Agency. She shares her transformative journey into photography and the thrill of receiving prestigious awards. The discussion unveils her exploration of LGBTQ+ representation in space and the challenges within NASA, alongside her intense astronaut training experiences. Mackenzie also reflects on balancing authenticity and creativity in queer narratives and her current projects focused on queer families and military history.

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INSIGHT

Value of Open Category

The open category allowed Mackenzie to use multiple techniques including archives and manipulated images.
Such an expanded definition is vital for telling complex, socially engaged stories.

ANECDOTE

Discovering the World Press Win

Mackenzie Calle found out she won the World Press Photo award late at night via email.
At first, she thought it was a prank but then realized it was real upon verification.

ANECDOTE

Sally Ride as Starting Point

Mackenzie discovered Sally Ride's queer identity through her obituary and was inspired to research further.
This sparked a deep dive into NASA's exclusionary policies against queer astronauts.

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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:

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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