Joanne Hollings on photography, solo travel, and putting herself in the frame.
What first pulled you toward photography, and how did the path from engineering lead you here?
My love for photography started simply, capturing moments with friends and time spent outdoors. Growing up in New Zealand, my dad's stories of backpacking through Africa and South America planted a seed of curiosity in me about the wider world.
A road trip through Yosemite and Oregon changed something. The scale of those landscapes, the simplicity of living on the road. I picked up a camera and never really put it down. By the end of 2018 I was documenting everything, fitting shoots around engineering studies and athletics training.
I never planned to do this full time. Engineering felt like the sensible path. Then 2020 arrived, the pandemic hit, and the job I had lined up disappeared. What followed was an unexpected gift, time to explore New Zealand more deeply than I ever had. These landscapes are hard not to fall in love with.
How does your engineering background shape the way you see and work?
It gave me resilience more than anything. The ability to push through when things get difficult. The technical side of engineering also made concepts like composition, leading lines and light logic feel intuitive quite early on. And when it came to building a business around photography, that critical thinking became essential.
For people seeing your work for the first time, what do you hope they feel looking at your pieces?
I want them to feel like they are there. That is why I place myself in the landscape rather than shooting it empty. A human presence gives the viewer somewhere to put themselves. It becomes less about looking at a place and more about feeling what it is like to be inside it.
I also came from a modelling background, having been scouted at fifteen, so there is something natural for me about being both behind and in front of the camera. The two feel inseparable now.
Your self portraiture has become a signature of your work. How did that style develop, and what do you hope it gives to the women who follow your journey?
It started as a way to show that you do not need someone else to create. That as a woman you can go alone, move alone, make something meaningful alone. Solo female travel still carries a weight of concern around it and I wanted to push back against that quietly, just by doing it and sharing it honestly.
What I did not expect was how much it would resonate. Women reaching out to say they booked a trip, picked up a camera, stepped outside their comfort zone. That means more to me than any accolade. If my image in a landscape makes someone feel like that place is accessible to them, like they could stand there too, then the work has done what I wanted it to do.
Where do you see your work going from here?
I want to keep pushing into conceptual work set within landscapes. More remote destinations, more disconnection from noise. I also write music and I have always dreamed of merging the two, sharing a story through song rather than just words beneath an image. That feels like the next honest step.
There is also a collaboration with an artist in Europe I am really excited about. Our creative energies sit well together and I think what we make will surprise people. I am not ready to share more than that yet, but it is coming.
