The work called Beyond Sunset was made in Thailand, at the exact moment when golden light was still sitting on the water and the scene was beginning to shift into blue. Maja Kerin did not photograph it straight. She used movement and a longer exposure so that the shimmering and the cooling ran together in a single frame, warm and cool at once, neither one winning. The result reads less as a record of a Thai coastline than as a temperature — the specific emotional temperature of that hour, that transition. It is a 2024 work, part of the Oceans of Calm series, and it is a reasonable place to start understanding what she is after.
Kerin, who is based in Monaco and has been working in photography for around a decade, uses a technique she calls camera painting: intentional hand movement during exposure, which turns light into something closer to gesture than document. The essence of the image is created in-camera, through movement, exposure, light and timing. Post-production is intentionally minimal and used to subtly refine what was already captured. She described the process as shooting multiple frames at a location until one of them carries the feeling she is trying to hold, then stopping. She does not use Photoshop. The only adjustment she allows herself is a selective enhancement of colour, and even that, she said, follows intuition rather than any fixed rule: "I feel colours are healing and sometimes I want to enhance some colours of that moment just based on following my intuition and feeling — but that is it."
What she is describing is a practice in which the creative transformation happens at the moment of capture rather than being created later through extensive digital manipulation. The practical consequence is that movement, exposure, light and timing become expressive choices, while selection and subtle refinement remain part of preparing the final artwork.
She came to this approach without a clear moment of conversion. When asked whether there was a specific shoot or shift that changed her understanding of what the practice could do, she said there was not. She simply followed what felt right. She completed professional photography courses in London in 2014. Her technical training gave her a strong foundation, which she later began using more intuitively, deliberately embracing movement and blur as expressive tools rather than photographic errors.
The early reception was mixed. She described a period when the work was not well understood, when the deliberate blur and movement read to some viewers as error rather than choice. That has shifted. She has now shown in Monaco, London, Paris, Milan, Dubai, and Chicago, and in 2023 she was named Best International Artist at Art for Life Chicago. One work has entered the private collection of Piero Ferrari. She mentioned that last fact without elaboration, and the profile notes it the same way.
The Best International Artist recognition at Art for Life Chicago, which she received in October 2023, came after a run of exhibitions that had accelerated sharply through 2022 — Espace 22 Gallery in Monaco, the FLUX Exhibition in London, the Holy Art in London twice, and Le Mona Lisa Galerie in Paris, all within a single year. By the time she returned to Art for Life Chicago in 2023, she had also shown at World Art Dubai and at Arthouse11 Gallery in Villefranche. The pace of that period is worth noting not as a measure of success but as context: the international exhibition schedule was building at the same time she was consolidating what her practice actually was. The award did not appear to have changed the work's direction, but it seems to have confirmed that the approach was legible to audiences outside the immediate Monaco context where she lives and works.
What seems to have mattered more to her than any single recognition is a particular kind of collector feedback — reports that the work continues to feel right in the spaces where it lives. She described receiving word that pieces are "still vibrating positively, calmly, joyfully in collectors' houses," and said that confirmed something she had been working toward without being able to fully articulate it early on. The word "vibrating" is hers, and she uses it deliberately. She holds a view of colour as frequency, of the image as carrying something beyond its visible surface. A collector once told her he had responded strongly to an abstract work without knowing it had been made on the island where he grew up. He felt a connection before he understood it. She found that significant: the possibility that an image carries an energy or memory that arrives ahead of explanation.
This is where the practice moves beyond straightforward photographic description. Kerin speaks about the possibility of a personal or emotional resonance with an artwork that can happen before we consciously understand why. The Oceans of Calm works, with their softened horizons and layered blues, reflect the calm and quieting she experiences and hopes to share through the work.
The Sleepy Cherry photograph, made in 2018 and part of the Poetry of Nature series, predates the Oceans of Calm works by six years and suggests that the palette and mood Kerin is now associated with were already present well before the international exhibition schedule filled out. The series titles — Poetry of Nature, Oceans of Calm — are unambiguous about intent. Their titles speak directly to the emotional qualities Kerin explores through the work. What the 2018 work also shows is that the camera-painting technique was not developed in response to critical attention or market feedback. It was already the method before anyone outside her immediate circle had seen much of it.
What comes through most clearly across the interview is the relationship between making the work and the state she enters while making it. For a long time, she said, photography was simply her way of creating. Over time she recognised that the act of creating was also doing something to her — slowing her down and bringing her into the present. That recognition has grown into Your Daily Pause, a method she has developed to help others slow down, notice more deeply and reconnect with themselves through mindful photography and creativity — in much the same way that photography helped her reconnect with herself. It is not about teaching photography or technical image-making; it uses the creative process as a way to become more present, notice the world differently and reconnect with yourself.
Your Daily Pause is already a developed method, shared through its website and on Instagram as @dailypausemethod. Kerin now understands her practice from the beginning as having been a form of mindful photography before she had that language for it: she followed her instincts and made work that required her to be fully present at the moment of capture.
When a work is finished, she said, she knows by a feeling — something subtle, a sense that the image has found its own balance. Technical refinement can go on for a long time without producing that feeling. When it arrives, she stops. It is the experience of a practitioner who has made enough work to recognise the difference between a photograph that is technically complete and one that feels resolved. The essence begins in-camera, and selection and subtle refinement help prepare what was captured as the final artwork.
“Photography gave me a reason to pause. In that pause, I began to reconnect with myself. Now, through my work, I hope to create that same sense of calm and connection for others.”
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