Gozin’a prepares a portrait through wardrobe, props, lighting and gesture, leaving room for the sitter to alter what she first imagined.

In Monkey Business, her 2011 portrait of filmmaker Luke Doolan, unanswered telephones, scattered paper and a chimpanzee at a typewriter turn creative work into a cinematic scene. Most of it was made in camera. The portrait became a finalist in the 2012 National Photographic Portrait Prize and received Gold from the London Photographic Association.

Her portraits of actors, filmmakers and public figures hold that same exchange. Preparation sets the scene; the person within it gives the image its life.

Confessions of the Heart, developed between 2016 and 2026 across New York and Sydney, makes testimony part of the portrait. In Harlem Love Stories: Confessed, black-and-white photographs sit beside personal accounts of love, shifting attention between face, voice and neighbourhood. Presented in Sydney across 2018 and 2019, the series carried stories made in Harlem into public space rather than containing them within a conventional gallery.

The concluding chapter, Sydney Love Stories: Confessed, extends the format to fifty portraits and fifty handwritten confessions. Developed for Muru Giligu, the public passage connecting 1 Elizabeth Street and 39 Martin Place, it brings photography, text, light and sound into a shared city space.

Other bodies of work widen that inquiry through place and material. Coney Love turns to Coney Island in colour, while In Bloom moves from the human sitter to flowers, retaining the close staging and controlled light of portraiture. In Rebirth, including Dutch Poppies, photographic imagery is carried onto eroded brass plates, where the changing metal becomes part of the image rather than a neutral support.

Across these series, the subject can be a person, a neighbourhood or a flower. Gozin’a’s attention remains close; the surface carrying it continues to change.

Developed over three years, The Doormen of New York began while Gozin’a was looking for a Manhattan apartment and asking doormen about vacancies. Those practical exchanges opened onto lives usually hidden behind a public uniform. Many of the men were Eastern European migrants; some had previously worked as architects, engineers or painters.

Each sitter was photographed twice: in doorman regalia with a nineteenth-century lace cravat, and in civilian clothes. Made on Hasselblad medium format, the formal portraits use a low viewpoint and elongated, El Greco-inflected compositions. Their grandeur sits beside the more intimate second image, giving the public role and the private person equal presence.

First presented in Sydney in 2017 as At Your Door: The Doormen of New York, the series placed large uniform portraits close to the floor beside smaller civilian studies. Mirrored inner edges in brass frames carried fragments of the sitters into peripheral vision, making the act of looking part of the installation.

A doorman knows the names, movements and habits of a building, while his own earlier life may remain largely unknown. Gozin’a’s portraits make room for those histories of migration, work and belonging.