Page 56 - Advertising Annual 57

BY DZANA TSOMONDO
Getting out of the city every chance I get helps me cope with living in New York,” Sarah Wilmer says. “I appreciate nature more because I am not constantly
surrounded by it.” The photographer does allow that the workspace in her Carroll Gardens apartment boasts a bucolic view, certainly in comparison with her Long Island City, Queens, studio. Outside these windows, the Manhattan skyline floats beyond rows of dilapidated industrial buildings and bright sunlight reflecting off the East River. Much of her work takes place out in the world, with this Carroll Gardens location reserved for studio shoots and the occasional cup of coffee with journalists. “I also shoot a lot in Prospect Park and Central Park—a lot of my photographs where people ask, ‘What is this magical place?’ were shot in Central Park or somewhere right off the highway in New Jersey,” Wilmer says with a laugh.
It’s difficult to do justice to work this cinematic and vibrant, strange and unsettling, without reaching for the term Lynchian. Indeed, Wilmer counts the enigmatic filmmaker as one of her influences. But David Lynch hinges his peculiar genius on juxtaposing the bizarre and the mundane. You would be hard-pressed to find anything mundane in the beautifully twisted worlds that Wilmer conjures. Each image seems to spring fully formed from its own fairy tale, replete with ice forests, doomed princesses and impossibly white birds. Wilmer skillfully blurs the line between fear and wonder, and color and contrast are everywhere—shadowy figures crouch in verdant meadows, baleful children hide in the gloom of tree trunks and a zebra pauses in a clearing, mist rising around it like steam.
David Herman, owner of boutique record label Squirrel Thing Recordings, has turned to Wilmer several times for album artwork. The tension between light and dark in her work captivated him, as well as her unerring ability to maintain that precarious balance. “Even when her images stretch the bounds of what’s logically possible, they always feel completely natural,” Herman explains of her intuition
for magical realism. “She distills the image down to its most potent form, so even when she’s integrating totally disparate elements, the whole thing has a very clear sense of harmony.”
Wilmer puts a lot of effort into researching and planning before shoots, so she can fully engage creatively during them. On set, she stays animated and lively, so despite the unusual requests she often makes of her subjects, they are too busy having fun to balk. Commercial assignments are necessarily collaborative, with Wilmer taking on the role of choreographer: “We experiment together with expressive postures, gestures, handmade props, constructed sets, wardrobe and lighting, all to create a feeling of heightened reality,” Wilmer says. “The elements may be familiar, but the composed images take on an entirely new, surreal quality.” Postproduction involves discovery and distillation: finding the emotional center in each image and bringing it to the fore.
Hilary Greenbaum, director of graphic design for the Whitney Museum of American Art, saw these talents firsthand when Wilmer shot the marketing campaign for the museum’s Laura Poitras: Astro Noise exhibit, which opened in February. “The exhibition contained many heavy topics, including mass surveillance, the war on terror and Guantánamo Bay,” Greenbaum explains. “Before the work was even installed, Sarah captured the gravity of the subject matter as well as the experiential nature of the exhibition with a mock- up in the artist’s studio. Her accuracy in representing the tone of the exhibition made the campaign both authentic and intriguing.”
There is an aspect of the absurd when talking to Wilmer about how she brings her otherworldly images into being. You can, of course, probe the nuts and bolts of the matter— equipment, locations, philosophical approach and so on. But ultimately, her bottomless imagination is the font from which all else springs. The roots of that mysterious, timeless world, where much of her work seems to exist, extend back
Right: “I felt honored to photograph Neko Case—a brilliant, creative and fascinating artist with an extraordinary career—for the Guardian. Sometimes the possessions my subjects surround themselves with or the things we encounter during a shoot spontaneously inspire my work. On the way out of Neko’s Vermont farm, I saw some fabric draped over a painting and asked her if I could place it on her head for a portrait. She said yes. It’s one of my favorite images from our sitting.” Sarah Gilbert, photo editor; The Guardian, client.
58 Advertising Annual 2016