Makenzie Steele.
Michigander, adventurer, photographer. Finishing her senior year with a BFA in photography at the College for Creative Studies, Makenzie is a passionate individual who enjoys crossing paths with those obtaining a story to tell and strives to leave each person feeling they’ve been heard.
Having grown with a natural curiosity of the complexities which accompany other people’s everyday lives, she has come to find herself searching to document the parts of life which are less accounted for.
Her collection, Sonder., was inspired by a road trip through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. While driving through the boundless country the UP has to offer, Makenzie began to notice all the decrepit gravestones within many off-the-road cemeteries. This observation posed many questions. Who is buried there? What was this person like? Do they still have family around today?
These curiosities and more are what lead her to want to document various weathered gravestones and pose the question to others . . . when our last physical link to this world begins to deteriorate, does our memory within this earth disappear alongside it?