Mia Kavčič grew up in Ljubljana, the daughter of an architect and a schoolteacher. Her first camera was a second-hand Pentax K1000 bought from a flea market on Pogačarjev trg when she was sixteen. She shot through one roll of film that weekend and understood immediately that she had found the thing.

After studying visual communication in Vienna, she spent three years working as a second shooter and then a lead assistant to architectural photographers in Rotterdam and Helsinki. This is where she developed the methodical patience that now defines her practice — the willingness to sit in a space for four hours before making a single exposure, to wait for the light to change or to settle or to give up and go somewhere else entirely.

In 2013, she photographed a small brutalist hotel in Belgrade for a regional design journal. The story ran in Frame and was subsequently picked up by Dezeen. That one project changed the scale of everything that followed. Within two years she was shooting for Wallpaper*, then Monocle, then for clients who had seen her in those publications and wanted something they could not quite describe but recognized when they saw it.

She does not photograph things she finds uninteresting. She will tell you this plainly in the initial consultation, and she means it. The waiting list is sometimes three months. She considers this appropriate for both parties.

She still lives and works in Ljubljana, in a studio on the north side of the city with two large skylights, an unreliable radiator, and a coffee machine she has had since 2011 and refuses to replace.