Photos by Jim Coarse and Christina Peters
Text by Richard L. Gaw

When Christina Peters was eight years old and living in Newark, her father, a chemist, gave her a plastic camera. By the time she turned ten, he taught his daughter to properly use his Minolta XT 101.

“The meter was simple – all you had to do was make the circle cross through the line in the camera, and for a child, that was so easy to understand,” said Peters, a Newark resident who has been a commercial and food photographer for the past 30 years. “I didn’t know what all of the other numbers meant, but as long as the line crossed through the circle, that was all that I needed to know. We’d ship my film off to Kodak, and when I got the photos back, my photos looked horrible. They were not what I imagined what they were in my head. I was constantly trying to figure out how I can get the image in my mind through the camera.”

Every person’s creative journey has a beginning, and the story of how Peters’ passion for photography may have started with the plastic camera, but it is one that has been layered with a curiosity to learn more about answering that complicated question, ‘How do I get more of me in every photograph I take?’

Peters’ first photography class was at Shue Middle School with Mr. Brubaker, who allowed the young photographer to use his makeshift janitor’s closet as her darkroom. She kept her eye trained on Newark, working for the yearbook at Newark High School and then at the Newark Post.

Eventually, she cracked the code that every good photographer begins to understand.

“I was working at Rainbow Records on Main Street, and one of my co-workers was in a band, and he needed some headshots. We went to the alleyway near the store, and I saw light coming through a window, and everything I had previously understood about photography had immediately shifted,” Peters said. “I saw lines and textures and shadows and highlights. It taught me to look at photography differently. I then began to look at things as a compositional element, instead of just a scene.”

After receiving degrees from Cecil College and then the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Peters began her career as a commercial food and floral photographer and where, from her studio in nearby Glendale and later in Marina Del Rey, she flew all over the country working for several advertising agencies, while also developing her talent as a fine arts photographer. While in California, she also created a food photography club that saw hundreds of photographers go through the program. 

“I tripped across my first account with a local grocery store,” Peters said. “They were hiring a new agency, and he was looking for a junior shooter. I began shooting every other week for the next five years, shooting every kind of food you can imagine.”

Since moving back to Newark with her husband in 2020, Peters has shifted her focus from commercial photography to fine art photography, launching Christina Peters Fine Art, with  particular emphasis placed in the area of floral imagery, which she sources from local flower farms whenever possible. Her photos are often seen at festivals and markets and are also showcased in several restaurants and cafes.

“On shoot day, my entire space is filled with flowers,” she said. “I make a shot list, determine what I want to shoot, and I will look at them through a lens and then place them in an arrangement. It’s just something that gets that dopamine going, because flowers certainly trigger all of our happy chemicals.

“The goal of the eye is to make everything in focus, but there are visuals that you can create with a camera lens that your eyes cannot, and that’s what I love about photography. It’s creating art that the eye will never see. It’s building a universe within that small frame.” 

To learn more about Christina Peters, visit www.christinapetersfineart.com.