Mark McGuire is a street photographer based in Dunedin, New Zealand. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in 1956, he studied architecture and fine art, and later earned an MA in information science and a PhD in media studies from the University of Auckland. For about ten years he worked in Toronto as a graphic designer and consultant with his own firm, before moving to Dunedin in 1993.
He taught design at the University of Otago for twenty-five years and left in 2018. Around the time he stopped teaching, he bought a full-frame Sony A7 III and began to take photography more seriously. Now he walks the same streets of central Dunedin almost every day with a 55mm prime lens. He looks for compositions in buildings, shadows, reflections, the city’s orange Orbus buses and the people passing by. Every weekend he publishes a new post in his Substack newsletter, Street Photography.
In our 2026 interview he spoke about waiting for the right person to enter a frame, working against the photographs he has already made, and street photography as a way of showing gratitude. “I think a good photograph is a question well framed,” he said.
