Today we’d like to introduce you to Montenez Lowery.
Hi Montenez, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started off in art as young as I can remember, holding a crayon. I have always been interested in telling stories and creating things that I hadn’t seen or felt the world needed more of so I leaned heavily into comics and animation. During undergrad, I took an intro to photo class that gave me an assignment. When trying to find a scene that fulfilled its parameters, I saw this mundane, plastic bag drifting, and for a moment, it flew in front of the sun. When I captured it, I was filled with so much emotion and amazement that this random set of events culminated in me making this beautiful picture by chance. I then took more photo courses and decided to dedicate my life to the medium of photography.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Hahaha, a smooth ride was far from what my journey has been like since the pandemic, through financial struggles that left my family and me without a home for a moment in time, to simple self-doubt in wondering if this path I chose was the right one for me. The struggles I faced and overcame did nothing but prove to me that I was right; that the steps I was taking were hard, but they were mine, and therefore they were right.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
What do I do….I do whatever my mind can think of. I think of a concept and see what’s the best course of action to bring it to reality in its best form. However, what I specialize in is photography, stripping it down to its bare essentials and building upon it from there. That sounds overly convoluted, but like, for example, the recent project I’m working on and what I’m most known for, ‘A Darktown Cakewalk’, is a series where I create pinhole cameras out of appropriated black cultural objects. Taking one of the earliest forms of photography and “appropriating” it to talk about black identity and erasure within the photographic canon. I’m most interested in how medium and material inform the concept of my projects. I’m most proud when my creativity takes the front seat and things get weird, and the puzzle pieces of the many ingredients I throw into a soup finally align to create a concoction that makes you think this shouldn’t work as well as it does.
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
I hope that when you have the opportunity to see my work in person, I’ll be able to surprise you! I want you to have learned and your previous notions of the world to change or be influenced after interacting with it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.montenezlowery.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/montenez.l/
