A tender portrait of a mother and her
daughters, this image is in many ways reminiscent of nineteenth-century studio
sittings. The painted and draped backgrounds, the young women's costumes, and
the photographic printing process are of the nineteenth century while the contemporary
dress of the mother, the glass and metal table, and the extravagantly painted graffiti
on the wall are of the twentieth century. The symbols on the sheet below the
image are the "tags" of the aerosol artists that created the painted
background.

Montoya has reached back almost to
photography's invention to give an old process new life. Invented in the 1850s,
a collotype is made from a photographic image and printed via hand-coated glass
plates which are later inked and printed similarly to lithographs. This
alternative process allows Montoya to reinterpret what she considers the
"sterility of straight photography" through the collotype procedure
and interject her own "conceptual expression."