About Rachel

Born 1995 · Auckland, New Zealand
Lives and works in Auckland.

Rachel Mataira is a New Zealand photographer and artist. Her work moves between documentary and landscape photography, often both at once. At the center of it is a simple belief: that land holds both memory and potential, and that if you look closely enough, and long enough, it will show you something about yourself too. She works mainly in photography. Increasingly, in large-scale installation too. The images don’t just show you a place. They hold you in it for a moment, long enough to feel what she felt when she made them.

Her path into photography didn’t start in the art world. She was working as an accountant when she began photographing, drawn to the land in a way she couldn’t fully explain. A pull toward stillness and quiet observation. Looking back, she thinks it was less about taking photos and more about learning how to notice the small, slow changes in the world around her. A print made for a charity auction was the beginning, though she didn’t know it at the time. What came next arrived quickly. New Zealand Geographic’s Young Photographer of the Year. A residency on marae that opened up a whole new body of work. Six solo exhibitions and two group shows, over six years.

Some of her documentary work carries a different kind of weight. In the aftermath of a national tragedy, her photographs were published by National Geographic. That work grew into a large-scale documentary exhibition, a way of holding space for something the country was still learning how to carry. After work like that, she found herself drawn back to the land, not to document anything in particular, just to sit with it, which in turn led to a deeper appreciation for the simplicity of landscapes and a new body of work. Her landscape photographs carry that same instinct: an invitation to find some stillness in something vast and steady, long after the noise has passed.

Coastal terrain, rural roads, alpine light, and shifting weather recur throughout Mataira’s work, not as subjects to be documented but as structures to be read, carriers of scale, distance, and time. These forms echo something older than the frame that holds them: the slow choreography of erosion and renewal, the turn of seasons, the shift of light, patterns that resist being rushed into meaning, but reward anyone willing to stay with them long enough to notice. Mataira’s images ask for that same patience. They function less as records of a place than as instruments for locating oneself within it, however briefly, however small.

Alongside her own work, Mataira has spent years on the other side of the gallery. First representing other artists, then running a gallery of her own. It changed the way she saw art. A photograph holds a place at a certain moment in time, but a place keeps changing long after the shutter closes. Once an image leaves the studio, that story doesn’t always travel with it. It passes through hands, homes, cities, sometimes generations. What happens to the story of the land, once it belongs to someone else? That question kept coming back. In 2025, she made the decision to go deeper, through research and formal study. She’s now completing a Master’s on it.

Her work sits in private and public collections across Australasia, Europe, the UK, and the US. She’s completed commissions for hotels, hospitality spaces, offices, and homes in New Zealand and overseas.