OUR/KIN/SAW is a film photography project by Arlton Lowry. The name is a play on Arkansas (say it out loud), and it’s the idea behind the work: a record of what our kin, the people of this state, have seen and built over the years.
Arlton grew up in the northeast Arkansas Delta, down gravel roads lined with cotton fields. A photography class he took in 2007 while attending UA Little Rock made him fall in love with the medium. On Saturdays back then, he’d get up before the sun and head into the Ozarks to shoot old, dilapidated structures. One frame from those trips, taken in Mountain View, ran in TIME Magazine later that year.
He still travels the state documenting its towns and the people in them, shooting black-and-white film on a Leica M5. In 2026 he took the camera farther from home, traveling India’s Golden Triangle and the rural Himalayas with his good friend Dero Sanford. Those photographs became his first exhibition, at Community Bakery in Downtown Little Rock.
He’s also an avid collector of found photography. His essay “Proof of Life,” published in the summer 2026 issue of The Idle Class magazine, makes the case that old snapshots of ordinary lives are worth saving.
By day, Arlton is Founding Partner and Chief Creative Officer of Few, the Little Rock digital product agency he co-founded in 2014. He serves as President of SoMa 501 and on the boards of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership and the UA Little Rock Alumni Association.
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