Alyssa Gonzales is a 20-year-old aspiring artist who studied
visual arts at The College of New Jersey with a concentration of lens-based art
as she is finishing her B.F.A for Visual Arts in photography at Mason Gross
School of Arts, Rutgers University. In 2013 she created a blog titled
“Chasing-Tomorrow” where she displayed her current art projects for two years.
Her blog was more than a place to document her work, it allowed her to grow and
expand as an artist as “Chasing-Tomorrow was just the start of her art career.
A photograph is a moment in time that only occurs once and
as an artist, a photographer is able to capture that very second and extricate
its beauty in a single medium. Photography taught me a lot about life and
enabled me to see the world in a different perspective. While looking through a
lens, you acknowledge most of what is overlooked on a day-to-day basis and
allow others to embrace something new and enable them to see the world from
your own perspective. My favorite subject to capture is people. I love being
able to compose a single being’s beauty and illustrate them in the light that I
see them in a photograph. Their eyes that reveal stories and wrinkles that
unfold time intrigues me as I document what “used to be.” As I started photography
I used myself as the main subject and played a lot with conceptual art and
surrealism. I used a lot of manipulation that is distinguished in my work
throughout the years. When I finally became comfortable with capturing images
of people I fell in love with the human race and its imperfections.