Today we’d like to introduce you to AARON MCKENZIE
Hi AARON, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Let’s get one thing straight – there has never been any master plan behind my life or career. When we tell the stories of our lives and careers, they tend to sound like neat sequences of events leading toward some inevitable conclusion, but trust me, mine has been more of a happy accident than a deliberate effort. I certainly never set out to become a producer or a photographer. As a kid growing up in Oregon, I dreamed of playing point guard for the Portland Trail Blazers, becoming the touring drummer for Jane’s Addiction, or maybe writing for Sports Illustrated. Typical kid stuff. The fact that I’d one day work in visual media? Didn’t even cross my mind.
After graduating college with an English literature degree, I found myself as directionless as ever. So, I did what many rudderless grads did: I headed off to South Korea to teach English. The plan was to do that for a year or two, then come back for grad school, maybe buy a tweed jacket and settle into life as an English professor at some quaint Midwestern college. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, right? I ended up living in Seoul for a full decade. It’s not a stretch to say that I grew up there, became an adult there.
I’m not sure what I expected to find in Korea but my time there changed the course of my life and the way in which I view the world. In the early 1950s, back around the time of the Korean War, South Korea had a living standard not unlike that of Sub-Saharan Africa today. By the time I arrived on the peninsula, the place was one of the world’s largest economies and boasted a first-world standard of living. Even the DMZ along the country’s border with North Korea was surprisingly quiet, if tense. It didn’t take long for me to start asking how a country goes from the sort of poverty most often described as “grinding” to a wealthy, safe society despite having no natural resources and being surrounded by hostile neighbors. I quickly learned, as the economist Robert Lucas put it, that once you start thinking about economic growth – really *thinking* about it – it’s hard to think about anything else. As a result, I ended up doing my master’s degree in economic policy with a focus on East Asian economic development and working in that field for several years.
Fast forward to 2014, and I found myself back in the States, ready for a change. By chance, I landed a job as a producer at Petrolicious, a media outlet dedicated to vintage car culture. Despite my lack of any visual arts background, they took a chance on me. My job: make the trains run on time while the creatives made them look pretty.
In 2016, I left Petrolicious and started my own production company, Antecedent Media. We work with all sorts of brands, creating commercials, documentaries, and branded content. Around 2018, I found myself doing a lot of 4×4 projects, which meant cramming into Jeeps with minimal space and heading into the backcountry. With no spare seats for a dedicated photographer, I grabbed a camera and started shooting stills.
Photography is now my favorite part of any project, even though I still write, produce, and do anything else necessary to get the client what they need. And while the projects on which I work as a lead producer – say, broadcast commercials – continue to be my largest in terms of scale and reach, I suspect that my public profile (to the extent that I have one) is as a photographer. I’m blessed to be able to do what I do and make a living at it, and I’m grateful that serendipity and necessity nudged me in this direction. To say that my current position in the world is the result of any grand plan, however, would be a lie.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I hit the jackpot in the lottery of life. I had the good fortune to be born in a beautiful corner of the richest country during the most peaceful, prosperous time in human history. When I was ten years old, the Berlin Wall came down, enabling me to travel to many corners of the planet that would have been off limits just a few years earlier. Throw in a massive economic and technological boom, loving parents, a decent education, and dodging the health issues that run in my family, and you’ve got a recipe for… well, no excuses.
But like I said – and despite all those advantages – I never quite got around to crafting that long-term vision for my life, the one everyone tells you you’re supposed to have. Instead, I’ve made a habit of stumbling into professional worlds where everyone else seems to have a game plan. Take my foray into economics. I was surrounded by colleagues who’d been studying theory and learning regression models since their undergrad days. And me? I was the English lit guy just trying to learn the basic math.
Fast forward to the creative world, and it has been déjà vu. I’m working alongside folks who’ve been honing their craft since art school, or at least working their way up the production ladder in some orderly fashion. I’m the one Googling terms under the table.
Or consider my stint at Petrolicious. On paper, I had absolutely no business being there. My qualifications? Let’s just say they were…non-existent, and I probably caused more problems than I solved. But my time there was invaluable. It opened doors, forged friendships, and taught me more about creative production than any cushy job ever could. Those shoestring budgets and high expectations were a real education and for all of this I will be forever grateful. I certainly wouldn’t trade my time there, whatever its challenges, for anything.
The lesson in all of this, I think, is that in our work and our art, it’s not necessarily a good thing to feel like you know what you’re doing, much less to be the smartest, most talented in the room. We should always be surrounding ourselves with people who force us to bring our A-game, and we should always be putting ourselves in positions where we feel a little unqualified, unprepared, and a little foolish. And we may not even have a roadmap for where all this is discomfort is taking us, but at least we’ll be learning and growing and, hopefully, expanding our sense of what’s possible.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
In an era dominated by streaming and “Skip Ads” buttons, my commercial work centers on crafting stories that people genuinely want to watch, rather than content that interrupts and annoys them. As Horace said in “The Art of Poetry,” great art should both “instruct and delight,” and I try to strike that balance in the stories I tell and the images I create. My goal is to inspire, inform, and entertain while helping brands connect with their audience.
Over the past five years, I’ve produced the “On the Trail” series for Driving Line and Nitto Tire, along with numerous short documentaries for Hagerty’s “Why I Drive” series. More recently, as managing editor of Marqued, I had the chance to delve into stories from all walks of life, telling stories from the car enthusiast community. My ability to find a story, whether it’s in the off-road adventures of 4×4 enthusiasts or the personal relationships people form through their vehicles, is rooted in a lifelong curiosity. From my early days spent reading books and exploring the outdoors, I’ve always been fascinated by how the world works and why people make the choices they do. Storytelling, to me, begins with this universal human experience—hard choices, sacrifice, loss, and resilience. If we can sit and listen to other people’s stories, we’ll start to see the themes that can help us understand our own lives. My job is to put all that on-screen for the viewer.
My favorite compliment is when someone describes my work as “cinematic,” especially when it comes to my photography. A strong image should evoke more than just the moment it captures – it should spark the imagination to wonder what came before and what might follow. When a viewer tells me that my photographs imply a larger narrative beyond that single frame, I feel I’ve succeeded.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
By the time I reached college, I had called more places home than most people do in a lifetime: Boise, Sprague River, Walla Walla, Milton-Freewater, Whiteson, Salem, McMinnville, Oregon City, and, finally, Washington, DC. My family moved often, and each new place was a crash course in adaptability. I learned to make friends quickly and find my way in unfamiliar surroundings. Luckily, I was also the kind of kid who could entertain himself for hours with just a book and his imagination, equally at home in the outdoors or a quiet corner of the library.
I was born in 1979 and so I grew up in a world untouched by the internet, but I was still young enough to adapt seamlessly when it arrived. The older I get, the more grateful I am to have lived in these two distinct worlds, especially in one where childhood was free of screens, rooted in the physical world and self-made adventures. Having a mother that kept our TV time in check helped, too.
Much of my time was spent outdoors, often unsupervised, with my friends. In Salem, we lived near the Chemeketa Community College baseball fields. In the summers I and my friends would walk over to watch the Dodgers’ single-A team from a knoll behind the first-base line. On our own, we played baseball with tennis balls, forcing the defense deep and making us feel like big-time sluggers. We rode bikes everywhere, caught pollywogs in the drainage ditch behind our house, and learned to swear from the older neighborhood kids. If you browse through my photography today, you’ll notice that most of the images were captured outdoors. Looking back at my childhood, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
When I wasn’t running around the neighborhood, I was probably off by myself with a book. Reading, of course, is a paradox: a solitary act that deepens our connection to the wider world and the other people in it. Fiction, in particular, is the closest we’ll ever really get to being inside another person’s mind and it’s one of the best ways to develop empathy and understand those around us. Our family didn’t have a lot of extra money when I was young and we couldn’t afford to travel very far from home, but reading also whetted my appetite for adventure and honed my sense of curiosity, such that I probably got (and still get) more out of my travels than I would have in the absence of all that childhood reading. Before I made it to India, I had already been there with George Orwell. The American Southwest? I’d traveled it with Edward Abbey. Africa? V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux and Joseph Conrad took me there. And Willa Cather ensured that the Great Plains will always have a kind of magic for me. Books expanded my sense of the world and its possibilities before I was able to get myself out “beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines,” as Conrad put it. That influence carries into my photography today, where I’m always trying to capture in images the emotions and ideas I first encountered via the written word.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://aaronmckenzie.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronwmckenzie/
Image Credits
All photos by Aaron McKenzie
