American Photographic Artists National
Thu 13th Aug, 2026
1st Place: Echo Cooper Title: Weaving the Ancient Future Location: California
Echo Cooper is a Chickasaw documentary photographer whose work explores the intersections of pastoralism, Indigenous identity, and the enduring relationships between people, animals, and land. As a working shepherd, Cooper photographs from within the communities she documents, using long-term engagement and shared labor to create intimate visual narratives about the lives of herders.
After earning a degree in photography and psychology from Texas A&M University–Commerce, Cooper worked as a wildland firefighter in Oregon before transitioning into regenerative sheep grazing throughout the American West. These experiences transformed her understanding of landscape, stewardship, and community, becoming the foundation of her photographic practice.
Living, working and caring for sheep, goats and dogs on the land in California. Living in symbiosis moving across the state for different ecological restoration contracts. Learning about how death is connected to life and life is connected to death and how that cycle is ever flowing in symbiosis. How do we knit together the past, present and future . How do we step into ancient futures?
2nd Place: Peter Moseley Title: Surface Matters Location: England
Dr Peter Moseley is a photographer and printmaker specialising in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic printing processes, including copper-plate and photopolymer photogravure, platinum/palladium and kallitype. Following a career in educational leadership, he completed an MA in Printmaking before undertaking doctoral research at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England. His PhD examined how the material qualities of early photographic printing processes influence the interpretation and experience of photographic images.
His practice is centred on portraiture and explores the expressive relationship between photographic image, printed surface and embodied presence. Through the distinctive material characteristics of historical processes, he investigates how texture, tone and physical printmaking contribute to meaning beyond representation alone.
His work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal West of England Academy and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, and has been presented in the solo exhibitions Take Five, Volte-Face, No Matter of Indifference, Dermis and Surface Matters.
I work with nineteenth-century photographic printing processes because they allow the photograph to exist as both image and physical object. Through photogravure, platinum/palladium and kallitype, I explore how texture, tone and material presence shape our experience of portraiture.
My work is concerned with the body, particularly the expressive qualities of skin and surface. Rather than treating the photograph simply as a transparent record, I seek to make viewers aware of the print itself—its ink, paper, relief and touch—as active contributors to meaning. The physical qualities of these handcrafted processes invite a slower and more reflective engagement with the sitter, encouraging viewers to look beyond likeness towards presence, vulnerability and individuality.
Each print is made by hand, allowing the material characteristics of the process to become part of the portrait. For me, the tactile language of early photographic printmaking offers a uniquely expressive way of exploring what it means to encounter another person through a photograph.
3rd Place: Paloma Rincon Title: My Garden Location: Spain
Born in Mexico and based in Madrid I am a lens based visual artist working worldwide. From commercial assignments for Worldwide Brands to experimental and presonal projects to feed my spirit, make my portfolio grow and learn new mediums and techniques. I have a degree on Audiovisual Communication from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid where I started to explore the possibilities of Photography combined with my interest in Design and Fine Arts.
My Garden is a personal photographic series developed over two years, created using only what I find in my own garden at a specific moment in time. The project is rooted in an ongoing relationship with a place and its gradual transformation.
What began as a raw, untouched garden became both subject and collaborator. As we worked on it, introduced new plants, and watched them grow (or fail to grow) the garden slowly evolved. Along the way, it became an active ecosystem where birds, insects, fungi, mold, and weather interacted.
The series follows a simple rule: every image is created using only what is present in the garden at that moment. This limitation turns the work into a visual diary shaped by time, seasons, and natural change.
As the seasons pass, the garden shifts between abundance and restraint, energy and stillness. Colors emerge and fade, textures dry out, forms soften or break. Working under these conditions required me to slow down, observe carefully, and pay attention to small details that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Composition becomes the main tool to transform ordinary elements into playful, minimal images. Rather than seeking control, the process embraces adaptation, patience, and curiosity.
In the studio, elements are carefully taken out of their original context and combined with other plants, rocks,wood, or organic matter found in the garden. Through composition, scale, and balance, these fragments are arranged into sculptural constructions, where light plays a defining role. Shadows, textures, and color interactions shape each image, turning familiar materials into abstract, almost architectural forms.
The project began shortly after I moved from the city to a small town and had a garden for the first time in my life. It spans slightly more than two years. Working with this space became a way of connecting with my new surroundings and with a quieter pace, very different from the urban environment I had always lived in.
My Garden reflects a personal transition as much as a visual one: a way of learning to look closely, to accept change, and to find beauty in what is already there.
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