Architectural photographer Maxwell Mackenzie has been providing award-winning large-format and digital photography services for architectural, interior design, corporate, advertising, health-care, hospitality, retail, and editorial clients since 1981. MacKenzie earned a BA from Bennington College, in Vermont in 1975, with a dual major in architecture and photography, and pursued post-graduate work at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art.

He has received individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, and the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts. MacKenzie’s fine-art photography can be seen in numerous private, corporate, and institutional collections, including the permanent collections of the American Embassies in Bogota, Columbia; Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire; Conakry, Guinea; Moscow, Russia; Kathmandu, Nepal; Dushanbe, Tajikistan; and Lima, Peru.

MacKenzie's commercial work is currently featured on over a thousand websites and has been published in brochures, books, and magazines worldwide. He is highly regarded for his exquisitely ordered, precise, and balanced compositions, and for the artful sensitivity and subtlety of his lighting. MacKenzie's work has taken him throughout the United States, Central and South America, and overseas to Europe and North Africa.

Artist Statement: In the year that I turned forty, I returned to the place where I was born, though not raised, and was drawn to make photographs of the remnants of an earlier life there, now all but passed away. To me, this landscape and these buildings –sad, empty, silent houses and falling down barns– possess a profound beauty, not merely for their spare, simple designs and weathered boards, but as monuments to the men and women who, like my own ancestors, made the long journeys and endured great hardships to reach this remote part of America and build in it a new home. Abandonings was the product of this journey.

American Ruins is a continuation and expansion of that project and presents an attempt to further refine the themes developed in the earlier work. The primary difference in technique is that in place of my former color palette, I restricted myself to black and white – with the aim of simplifying and distilling the essence of these beautiful and fast-disappearing structures.

With Markings, no longer earthbound [the photographs were shot from the artist’s ultralight], I have returned to color, but have started to move away from buildings to the patterns I discovered in the surrounding fields and rivers, lakes, and trees. I bring them to you in the frosty early morning, and in the golden sunset.