Keaney has taken on the role of acting artistic director, a six-month stint that will see her anchored in the capital, at least for a time. But on this day, her mind is not on the famous soaring Canberra winter blue outside but on the crowded grey skies of Europe. She is off to the Netherlands this weekend for the launch of her book, Fashion Photography Next, with an accompanying exhibition at Foam, a photography museum in Amsterdam.

It’s a project three years in the making, and the culmination of a career’s worth of contact-building, both here and in London, where she worked as a writer and curator for nine years. She came home to Australia, and to Canberra, in 2012 because she missed it too much. And for the moment, she’s in something of a holding pattern.

Keaney has built up such a profile for herself overseas that it’s slightly disorienting to think that she would rather be back here. But then, as anyone in the local arts scene knows, Canberra is as connected to the rest of the world as London or Amsterdam or, indeed, Sydney and Melbourne. And sitting in a place such as the Glassworks, who wouldn’t want to live here?

Keaney is a Canberran, if not born then definitely bred. Her parents, Jim and Margaret, both doctors, moved here when she was a baby to take up roles at what was then the Royal Canberra Hospital. She went to school at Merici College in Braddon, and went on to study art history at the Australian National University. After completing a post-graduate diploma in curatorial studies at Melbourne University, she returned to Canberra to work at the National Gallery of Australia, “pushing trolleys around” as an assistant in the Works on Paper department. This was in the mid-1990s, and one of the people who interviewed her was Andrew Sayers, the former director of the National Museum who was, back then, curator of Australian drawings, watercolours and colonial paintings. He soon gave her a job as a research assistant in Australian art, which was the start of her career in curatorial work, and took her with him when he moved across to the National Portrait Gallery, then located in Old Parliament House.

“I was there from 1998 to 2003, and worked with Andrew and the fantastic small team that we had for the inaugural historic display, the first exhibitions, and that’s where I curated my first photo show, Glossy: Faces Magazines Now,” Keaney said. She also curated So You Wanna be a Rock Star in 2001, a show about music and portraiture. Her time there was the start of her enduring love of photography.

With the help of Sayers, she applied for an Australia Council grant to travel to take up a fellowship with the photography collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

“That was meant to be three months and it kind of ended up being nine years,” she says, laughing.

She worked on a 19th-century photography project while at the museum, and thus began a long-time preoccupation with Victoriana. She returned to Canberra after the fellowship, but with itchy feet.

She was then accepted into a course of Victorian aesthetics at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, but, without a fellowship, began looking around for work so that she could pay her fees.

“I ended up working for a year at a fashion photography agency, and it was the hardest job,” she said. “Going from being a curator to working as an agent for photographers was really challenging, but I needed to make some money, so that’s why I did it.”

But the work, though difficult, also opened her up to the world of fashion. “I was working for a really great agency called MAP that has an incredible fashion roster – they work with some of the best fashion photographers in the industry,” she said.

She worked with on magazine shoots and met some celebrities, but really, she said, there wasn’t much glamour to it. “Most of it wasn’t going on shoot and being on set, it was doing production and problem-solving. But those people then became really good friends as well … I was part of that kind of community in London.”

Although she had always been interested in fashion – like any university student in Canberra, she remembers devouring issues of The Face and i-D magazines – being in the centre of it all in London was a different world.

And on top of the job at the agency, she still managed to complete her masters at the Courtauld, filling her head with the dual aesthetics of modern high fashion and Victorian aesthetics.

“It wasn’t Monday to Friday, it was Saturdays at the British library. You just do what we all do, and all have done at different times in our lives,” she said.

“I think it’s interesting because with photography you can work meaningfully and enjoyably between Victorian photography and fashion photography, and it’s all sort of intertwined, and keeps coming back to me and helping me in different ways.”

Once she had finished her studies, she got a job as an assistant curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, working on the contemporary commissioning program. She later helped produce a scholarly catalogue of the later Victorian collection, and on several shows as part of a pool of assistance curators, including Face of Fashion, a show that included a commissioned portrait of supermodel Kate Moss by the now late photographer Corinne Day.

Along the way, she had side projects – a book about fashion and advertising, aimed at students, and an exhibition with the Australian photographer Derek Henderson, an old acquaintance she bumped into at a London cafe.

Eventually, she was appointed associate curator of photographs, and was handed the major Irving Penn portrait show.

“That was their big spring show of 2010, and basically, I had two years working on producing a show about one of my photographic heroes, and it was incredible. We produced a catalogue, there was an international symposium, it was amazing,” she said.

After six years at the gallery, Keaney took a job at the London College of Fashion as the first creative director of its Fashion Space Gallery.

“I started a program for them, a strategic curatorial program, and photography was heavily featured,” she said.

She also staged a show pairing the works of Canberra artist eX de Medici with British fashion designer Vexed Generation.

“It was a really fortuitous and interesting timing because it was right before the student riots and then the riots kicked off in London with disaffected young people,” she said. “Because eX’s photographs dealt with turmoil and conflict protest in the world, and I was really interested in how garments and dress in most photographs and gesture talked about power and/or protection or conflict or abuse of those things.”

By the time she was approached by publisher Thames & Hudson to produce a book on fashion photography, she was well and truly over London.

“A lot of stuff was really kicking in with the austerity measures in London and I was just getting really homesick, to tell you the truth,” she said. “For our beautiful big winter blue sky, for Canberra and for Australia, so I was telling everyone … that I really want to come home.”

When she saw a job advertised with the Gallery of Australian Design in Canberra, it seemed a good fit. She returned in 2012 and oversaw two big shows at the lakeside gallery, a retrospective of Fred Ward’s furniture and a design competition for the Lodge. The gallery has since relocated and Keaney is now looking for her next project, whether here or overseas.

Although her parents have both passed away, she still has family here and says Canberra will always feel like home. She is also thrilled to be working at the Canberra Glassworks, an organisation that barely existed when she last left Canberra.

“I’m always really open to opportunities and work and projects,” she said. “I am really interested to see what happens with my book and the show. It’s quite a big deal; the book will have worldwide distribution and Foam has a really great profile in Europe and America. The show’s then also travelling to London and we’re trying to get a venue in America, and I would love it to come to Australia.”

The book investigates the state of contemporary fashion photography at a time when many in the industry are complaining the glory days are over. It’s a complaint she aims to comprehensively debunk, with work by emerging photographers from 14 countries who are helping to shape the fashion of the future.

And what of Keaney’s future? Watch this space.

Fashion Photography Next, by Magdalene Keaney, will be published on July 28 by Thames & Hudson.