Olivia Montalto is a portrait and documentary photographer. She was born and raised in downtown Manhattan, New York City, and received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography from Parsons The New School for Design in 2020. Olivia is very inspired by color, memory, and the feeling of nostalgia, all which help influence her style today. She currently still lives and works in lower Manhattan.
To Olivia Montalto, a photograph is more than just a capture of life in the moment, but rather a means to structure her own. Her work exhibits the documentation of “what was” for her, and brings a source of gratitude for the life she captures now. She has a habit of sequencing and labeling the backs of her prints with the dates of the moments in time she saves not just for herself, but for her audience. Her photographs are akin to a diary – they are not deliberate, but instead natural. They are fair representations of her subject’s body language. Although extracted from stillness, her photos evoke a sense of youthfulness – the time you and your friends will remember forever. In a pursuit for the audience to remember a memory of their own, Olivia invites you into her world of nostalgia.