Maria Montes is a rising junior at Pratt Institute working towards completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography. Her visual style has been influenced by her Hispanic-American heritage and it is a consistent theme in her photos. Montes’s photographs are an exploration of her Mexican and Peruvian culture. The images show both the positive and negative experiences of being a Hispanic person in the United States. Some of those experiences include the pressure she feels, as a first-generation immigrant, to become someone successful enough to one day give a better life to her parents as they have given to her by coming to this country. Montes’s images employ the use of family photographs, projections and representations found on the streets of Brooklyn that celebrate the beauty of her culture. She finds it especially important to share the stories of others like her and she plans on doing this in the years to come.