When someone has a name like Stella-Rae, it's hard to know what to expect. But, after seeing her work, it's perhaps not surprising that she's, at the age of 27, an avowed tomboy, a photographer with a long-time preoccupation with traditional images of masculinity. Skateboarders, motorbikes, signet rings – there's something about the aesthetic that appeals to her.
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"I guess I've always had male friends," she says.
"I don't really have heaps of female friends, and when I do they're my best friends, and they're always the partners of the guys anyway. But I've always been hanging around guys all the time, I find it easy just to hang out with them, so it's kind of just progressed from there and then I just end up documenting."
We're sitting on the back steps of M16 Artspace, where she now has a solo exhibition of photographs of the custom-made motorbike scene. It's a Monday and there's maintenance work happening all over the gallery, and outside it's not much better. The drilling in the background seems appropriate.
Smiles for Miles is a collection of mostly black-and-white images captured over the past two years, on Zelnik's adventures on the back of her partner's motorbike as they headed off for weekend jaunts with like-minded friends. The opening last week – which included actual motorbikes inside the gallery to add to the atmosphere was heavily attended; the show attracted praise of the surprised kind, and she even sold a couple of framed images.
"I think it's just a different body of work. People haven't really seen this sort of motorcycle photography," she says.
"Usually it's more clinical, or specs of the bike, whereas this is very much a natural flowing exhibition. It's literally just been me on the back of a bike with my partner, Dan [Hennessy], and I just have my camera strapped around my neck and we just go for rides with friends, and I literally just turn around and take photos. I'm searching for the image but I'm not creating them, in a sense, I'm not telling people to stand here and smile. I just kind of stand in the background and when I see it I take a photo."
Having done most of her schooling in Canberra, Zelnik completed a degree in commercial photography at CIT after college, before heading to the ANU School of Art to study photo media.
"That really opened my eyes," she says.
"Going from commercial, having proposals that you have to fill out, you have all this stuff that you've got to follow, and then at the art school they were like, 'You can shoot whatever you like!' And so there I really got to hone in on my artistic skills."
And although she does some work as a commercial photographer, her preference now is to take her vintage 1960s Leica camera out and shoot on film – throwing herself at the mercy of a roll of film and a darkroom at the end of it.
For many years she was ingrained in the skateboarding scene, documenting competitions and attending the Bowl-a-Rama events in Sydney. But, as she moved through her early 20s, she grew disenchanted.
"I think the mentality of the skateboarding community just kind of stayed the same and I was maturing, so I wanted to find something that was a little bit more – I shouldn't say mature, but a bit more grounded," she says.
"[Skating] is very commercialised, whereas with motorcycles, you can't really be sponsored, you just build this machine to ride it. It's all solo. If you're going to go for a run you go for two days with a bunch of friends, whereas with skateboarding you can have anybody and everybody come ... I'm kind of a little bit tainted by it, I've been burned by the skateboarding scene, especially being a female."
Her shift in focus onto motorcycling was just that – a total, sudden shift.
"It was literally just a mind switch – it was really, really weird," she says.
She made some approaches to the community, and swiftly met her now boyfriend Hennessy, who took her for her first hair-raising ride on the back of his bike.
Two-and-a-half years later, she had enough work to put together the show, a series of images documenting the journeys and the sense of freedom the lifestyle embodies.
And, while many of the works have people in them, almost none are women, although Zelnik says this wasn't intentional.
"I don't shoot them to be masculine, it's more just pure documentation," she says.
"I try to put my feminine turn on it – I don't shoot it to make these men look really masculine in that way, I try to have this feminine view on things. They're quite gentle in a way, they're not aggressive.
"These guys are all gentle, they all have families, they all just go riding on the weekends and spend so much time building these babies, their machines, and it's nice to be able to translate that into something that's not this masculine gang sort of mentality."
Almost all the images were captured on her Leica, and processed at home – hence the black and white – and scanned herself. Using film can be laborious, she admits.
"It's worth it, though, just so people can understand – it's completely different," she says.
She's not sure whether using a Leica makes her an anomaly, but she wants this show to be something of a comeback, or a reinvention of her persona in the Canberra photography scene.
"I was getting a lot of work before, with the skate stuff, and I do commercial stuff, all digital, but I think people forget that I do other stuff, that I have my own solo stuff," she says.
"If I could I'd just do this, I'd just follow bikes around all day. You could!"
Smiles for Miles, by Stella-Rae Zelnik is showing at M16 Artspace until March 20.
