AC Towery is an artist, photographer, and educator living and working in NYC. Her current photographs explore the visual relationships and meanings created by the convergences of place, time, color, texture, line, shape, and proportion. Towery received an MFA in Visual Arts from the Visual Studies Workshop after completing a BFA in Photography and Painting from Washington University in St. Louis.
“As a photographer, I observe and respond intuitively to what I see. I am confident in my process and my working method. When I observe photographs asking to be made, I acknowledge the invitation.
Living in NYC, I notice the constant changes in this archetypal urban environment. The relentless development of the past decades is widely apparent, creating contrasts of old and new in every neighborhood. Inspired by photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz and Bernice Abbot who photographed their own changing cities, I take to the streets, looking for evidence of this metamorphosis. I photograph as a citizen of this place, a daily inhabitant, noticing, recording, and reflecting as it persists.
I create deliberately considered groups of photographs from my individual images. The photographs gradually coalesce into a coherent montage which transforms into a collection. This process includes making time and space for paying careful attention to the images, playfully experimenting and allowing room for chance and random circumstances.
The sequences I develop create a complex and specific way of seeing. The varying groups and combinations allow for unexpected nuance, complexity and dialogues between images to develop. In an era when facts are open for debate, capturing what I see becomes a political statement of my reality.”