The studio Melbourne families grow up with. 22 years, one family at a time.
Karina Wells has photographed Melbourne families for 22 years, the last 16 of them at Enhance Studios and the last 12 as its owner. Long enough to know what a family will one day go looking for, and long enough to make sure it is there.
Every photograph that leaves this studio is made to be the one that remains. That is the whole of what we believe, and it has a page of its own, in her words.
The Origins
Every studio begins with an eye and this one began in a house where imagination was treated as something to be built rather than admired.
Karina grew up in Geelong with with her identical twin sister, Jade, and a mother that could make “anything”. Each Book Week the two girls were invited to dream up whatever costume they liked, however unlikely, and their mother would find a way. One year Karina arrived at school as a Smartie with a bite taken out of it. Another year Jade went as a school ruler. The year they chose the Titanic, their mother built them a boat big enough for two. Nothing was ever too weird or wonderful to be created and that lesson was instilled early.
At 12-years-old, Karina began spending afternoons in a life drawing class run by her mother’s closest friend and artist. There she learned the art of “sitting still” for a very long time, which gave her the opportunity to observe the artists work, what could be done with colour when someone knew how. It was the first time she had been in a room with people who made art for a living.
It was this moment a door opened.
Her Photography journey began with family. Her uncle photographed art for a living – the paintings, the objects and the installations that other artists had made, and when Karina was in high school she spent a week of work experience at his side. He was working at the very edge of the digital age, and she watched a craft she already loved being remade in front of her.
But fine art came first, all the same. At art school she made ceramics and installations and designed whole spaces, and yet every piece she finished came back to the same two things, the quality of the light and the photograph that held it at the moment the light was right. Mood and moment, she calls it.
The camera kept being the point. So she went back and studied photography properly, this time for the technical understanding she knew she was missing. She already had the eye. She wanted to know exactly how the instrument would give her what the eye could see.
The artist who inspired her was never a photographer. It was Yoko Ono, and less the work than the position beneath it. Ono’s art has always insisted on joy, curiosity and the things that make a life worth living, and Karina learned from her that these are harder to put into art than despair, and worth the difficulty.
A studio can be built on that position. This one was.
The Studio
Enhance Studios was founded in Brighton by photographer, Mark Rossetto. In 2010 Karina joined him behind the camera.
In 2014, she took the studio over and moved it to South Melbourne. In 2021, it moved again, to Port Melbourne, where it is today – one shooting space, built for the work, whether the work is a newborn in her first fortnight or a family of 30.
The Families
Around 4,000 Melbourne families have been photographed by Enhance Studios and many of them more than once.
A family arrives for the first time with a newborn and come back with the second baby, then the third.
They come back in the last year of primary school, when the children are suddenly tall and still willing. They come back with teenagers who swore they never would, and who stand a little apart until they forget to.
And one day they come back for the portrait with every generation in it, the grandparents in the middle, the newest baby in someone’s arms, everyone who belongs in one frame.
The studio has kept its records for all 22 years and it has kept the relationships that go with them.
Out of those records grew a project close to the studio’s heart, Then & Now, which brings the same families back years apart and sets the two photographs side by side. The first portrait and the latest one.
The same eyes, a different height. It is the studio’s story, told by the people it was made for.
Karina's "Why"
Every photographer has one photograph that explains all the others. Karina’s is of her grandmother.
Her grandmother was a force in her day, and in her later years she had a better social life than Karina did. She wanted to be around people, her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren most of all, and even when she could no longer follow the conversation she wanted to be in the middle of it. In 2016 Karina decided to make a portrait of her that would hold both truths at once. She composed it before her grandmother arrived. A floral headband for the youthfulness that never left her, in mind or in attitude, set against the old-fashioned nightie and the small signs of her real age. Two things true in a single frame.
Her grandmother had other plans. She arrived dressed as the Queen. Her bright white hair was styled in the royal fashion, there were pearls to match, and she wore a dress in vibrant blue. Who was anyone to refuse a queen her portrait? So Karina made that one first, and then, because her grandmother allowed it, she made her own. The royal portrait is how her grandmother saw herself. The other is how Karina saw her. Both are true, and that is the whole craft in a sentence.
Her grandmother passed peacefully in 2020, in the middle of everything that year was. When the family chose one photograph to stand for her, they chose the Queen.
Karina will tell you those two portraits are the most valuable things she owns. They are what remains of a woman who was loved that much.
It is the reason this studio exists. So that your family has its photograph while everyone is still in the room.
The Principles That Define Us
(01) A Higher Standard
Experience, professionalism and mastery are why Melbourne families choose Enhance, and the standard every photograph is held to. 22 years behind the camera. The highest quality and the best experience, for every client, every time. Your first portrait made to the same standard as your ninth.
(02) Relationships First
A photograph of a family begins long before the camera is lifted. It begins with knowing the people in it: the newborn who needs settling, the teenager who needs winning over, the grandparents who need to feel the fuss was worth it. Karina builds the relationship, draws the family together, and only then makes the photograph. What hangs on the wall is the connection, made visible.
(03) Always Leading, Never Following
Karina has never been interested in the expected photograph, or the expected anything. The way the studio is run, the pieces it makes, the way a family is seen and shown: each is decided by what is next, not by what is already everywhere. Nothing beige leaves this studio. Being first is not a strategy here. It is a habit.
(04) The Print Is the Legacy
Every photograph made here is made to exist long after the day it was taken, and to be held. Printed, mounted and framed, or bound into an album, because that is what gets handed down. A portrait moves house with a family. An album comes down off the shelf for a child who has never seen it. A file is kept. A print is inherited. Made for the child who is not born yet, who will one day take it down from the wall and know exactly where they came from.
(05) The Studio You Grow Up With
Families come back. For the second baby, for the last year of primary school, for the teenagers, for the portrait with the grandparents in it. We keep the records and we keep the relationship, and we will be here for the next chapter.
Our people
Karina Wells, Owner & Photographer
Karina has photographed Melbourne families for 22 years, at Enhance since 2010 and as its owner since 2014. A Bachelor of Fine Arts for the eye, an Advanced Diploma of Photo Imaging for the instrument. The rest is hers alone: the way a newborn settles in her hands, the way a teenager forgets to be guarded, the way three generations end up in one photograph looking like themselves. The standard does not move. The highest quality and the best experience, for every client, every time.
Emily Axford, Studio & Client Care
Emily is the reason the studio feels the way it does. A photographer by love, she learned the craft of the styled shoot in a year at a magazine. From your first booking to the day your order is ready, Emily is looking after it. A Bachelor of Arts in Professional and Creative Writing.
Tejas Boolakee, Design
Tejas helps you see the finished piece in your home before it is made. Trained in interior design, with a Master of Design under way at RMIT, she is why the artwork fits the home as well as the family. She speaks French, Mauritian Creole and Hindi too. Pronounced, in her words, like contagious without the con.
Giving back
Over the years the studio has raised money with River’s Gift, HeartKids, the McGrath Foundation, Kidsafe, Heatherton Christian College, Sisterhood, Operation Christmas Child and Amelia’s Charity Auction, and with many more school fundraisers and local community organisations.
Clubs, schools and charities still raise money with the studio every year, through photography drives and fete days.
Recognition
Enhance Studios has won more than 50 international, national and state photography awards. The studio is prouder of the families who came back. Whenever you are ready to start your own story with us, there is a place here.
