Monique Gray discovered her love of art as a child when she saw her brother drawing. She began to draw and eventually began photographing with a Diana camera she won in a small contest. During her high school years she visited her family in French Guiana and saw her cousin photographing and then processing film in an attic. She became curious about the full process and took a photography class and fell in love with the darkroom process. She then went on to attend Lemuel Penn Career Development Center where she met and learned photojournalism from Llewellyn Berry {en/member/kindalewgallery}. He was a great influence in the college she chose as she wanted to definitely continued learing from an art perspective and not specifically journalism. Once leaving high school she attended and graduated from The Corcoran School of Art/Corcoran College of Art and Design. During that time she studied fine art, print making, painting, of course photography and also worked as an intern for a commercial photographer where she learned a great deal of lighting and product placement. This became very important as it helped her to learn control over certain subject matter for still life photography.
After graduating she went on to work as a darkroom lab technician at USA TODAY and eventually became an assistant photo editor. All the while still taking photographs of her own. After many years at the paper she desired a change and new challenges. She went to work at AOL as a photo editor and shortly there after became senior photo editor.
Her hectic life kept her from doing her art full time but she kept creating quietly in the background. Her role in her career helped keep her involved and aware of the growing changes in photography specifically the development of Photoshop and how that impacted the field. While she will use Photoshop she prefers to stick some of the more traditional uses as if it were a darkroom. Like burning, dodging and cleaning up the image. Occasionally something will warrant a Photoshop creative moment but she prefers the image be true to what she originally shot in camera. Her vision of the world isn't always the full blooming flower or street scene but a few petals glistening in the light or a found object with simple lighting.
Currently her vision through the macro lens is a passion. She will be adding other forms of art in the future so please come back to visit.
