Growing up in New York’s Greenwich Village, Peter Bennett picked up his first camera and took his first darkroom class at the age of twelve. Peter spent many years working as a travel photographer, and in 1998 started an all digital stock photo agency, New York Stock Photo. In 2015 he formed Citizen of the Planet, LLC, devoted exclusively to the distribution of his stories and photographs that focus on a variety of environmental subjects.
Peter’s work has appeared in hundreds of publications including the New York Times, Sierra Magazine, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Sunset Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and New York Magazine. His prints hang in the California State Capitol, California Science Center’s permanent Ecosystem exhibit, and many other museums, private institutions, and collector’s homes. Peter has had seven books published, his most recent book: The Los Angeles River, Photographs by Peter Bennett was published in late 2021.
“I am interested in presenting reality more accurately than I can actually see it. On one level, my work is about a certain density. There is more to see than we can actually see.”
Busch’s large format black and white photographs, ranging from 8”x10” to 40”x60” (shot with the world’s largest portable camera, designed and built by the artist himself), present images of great beauty and irony, great subtlety and elegance. In Busch’s photographs, “actuality is not abbreviated but opened into the world, not merely documented but discovered,” states Dr. Donald Bartlett Doe, Director of the Mulvane Art Museum, Topeka, KS. Busch’s vision and personal sensibilities enable him to capture the monumental in the ordinary, to inform the details of everyday life with sensitivity and clarity.
Robert J. Evans, Director of the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, notes, “Busch’s combination of technical perfection and personal poetic sensitivity is truly overwhelming. His intense, aesthetic vision combines with his outstanding craftsmanship to produce strong works, simple and direct, yet redolent of the great artistic tradition that preceded him. There is a deeper mood and a quality of light washing through the cityscapes distinct in feeling from what we can see in most American imagery. Busch’s sensibility shines through always, creating harmonies that delight the eye.”
Busch’s technical ability is widely acknowledged and respected. His work has been published in virtually every international photographic magazine. Jannes Art Publishing of Chicago, IL writes, “Mr. Busch will become, within the next few years, one of the world’s outstanding and most noteworthy black and white photographers. The technical caliber of his work is superb, his vision exciting and strong.” Numerous publications have cited Busch’s technical expertise in inventing and building photographic equipment for large format photography.
Al Weber comments, “Busch’s genius is his ability to combine his artistic talent with an uncanny technical expertise in a way which has placed him in a unique position within the international photographic field. By those who are familiar with his work, he is considered one of the most talented and accomplished large format black and white photographers anywhere.”
Paula Ely has, with her partner Cesar Rueda, collected fine-art photography for nearly 20 years, with a focus on work from Latin America. Paula is past President of the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles, a member of the Getty Museum Photographs Council and a member of the Photography Initiative at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She has led tours and appeared on panels at Paris Photo, Zona Maco, Photofair San Francisco and Photo LA. She has served on the host committee for the Las Fotos Project’s Foto Awards, and she is an advisory board member of the Fellowship Trust, a startup gallery dedicated to AI art. She has been a regular guest on Fellowship’s X/Twitter space “Collecting Photography: From Silver Gelatin to NFTs”. Paula’s company, Paula Ely Projects, licenses and distributes television programs to local affiliates and streaming platforms. Congratulations to the honorees of the 2025 LACP awards!
Erica Kelly Martin is an American lens based artist and native of Los Angeles, California. Martin photographs people in their surroundings, their rituals and the manifestations of their interior lives, as well as human influenced landscapes, and still lives that reflect current events both personal and universal. Her work concerns recurring themes of identity, transformation, and the paradox of human existence captured at a moment in time. Her photographs show the fraying edges of polite society, and the vernacular secrets that most people pass by. In addition, Martin has created a series of portrait works, often of alternative communities, exploring how her subjects navigate the world and find their tribe. In Martin’s portrait projects, her relationship to her subjects is the focus point, and the images reflect her presence behind the camera. Martin is the mother of two, and was for many years an environmental attorney. Martin’s work has been featured on Lenscratch, Lensculture, Musée Magazine, L’Oeil de Photographie and PDN Magazine, and has been shown at galleries and exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Milan.