Erica Kelly Martin is a photographer, artist, educator, and curator based in Los Angeles. Her work examines the artifacts and absurdities of American life through meticulously staged still lifes, human-inflected landscapes, and portraits that move between the sacred and the irreverent.
Before devoting herself to photography, Martin practiced environmental law, an experience that continues to inform her attention to landscape, institutions, culture, and the stories we construct around them. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Photo London, the Milan Image Art Fair, Fotofever Paris, Alta Vista Arts in Paris, the Moving Lab in Venice, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and galleries throughout the United States. Art Tribune named her series Ten Thousand Untrue Things one of the best of MIA Fair 2023.
Her projects examine the objects, myths, rituals, and belief systems through which we understand ourselves. I’m Fine, Everything’s Fine considers comfort, consumption, and control in uncertain times; West of Truth looks at the stories embedded in the landscape of the American West; and A Bee in the Rose reimagines inherited narratives surrounding women, myth, and identity.
Martin’s first monograph, West of Truth, is forthcoming from GOST in 2027. She serves on the Board of the Los Angeles Center for Photography and as an advisor to Pasadena Photography Arts.
