The images I am driven to make are often a mystery even to myself. Impressions, feelings and ideas come to me and I execute them. I get fascinated with a person or story and want to explore the many possibilities of what can happen between us in the world and in front of my camera. Forests, created sets and various nightscapes are the places I often go to for picture making. Peculiar moments and the darker side of things are the guts of my photographs. While my images tend to be dark in some ways, I attempt to infuse them with a certain amount of magic, beauty and hope.

Utilizing various elements such as color, time of day, action and mood I create a certain visual aesthetic consistent through out my work.I work from a personal and powerful place guided by intuition, when I think back and try to explain the process it seems as if it was almost trance like. I get an aching to photograph and that is the first part of the process. I won’t feel right and cannot sleep-this persists annoyingly until I work.  Next is writing and drawing in my notebook and the mission gets more vivid. I will orchestrate with specific subjects I have been thinking about or find and pair them up with the right location. Next I think of what I want to happen when we get together. Sometimes this has to do with a relevant reality but more often than not, it is play, theatrics, and experimentation –creating a world or situation reacting to the environment we got ourselves in to. Mostly I have a desire for surreal experiences and I find most of the people I work with also have this longing to desert the everyday and push towards something else, another way of being or experiencing the moment. The whole experience is very intimate, special, challenging and exciting and it is the only thing I know that is like it.Being a musician myself, I am influenced very much by music, specifically artists with rich lyrics containing imagery and powerful visuals.  Joanna Newsom, The Rachel’s, Smog, and White Magic are a few of the artists I listen to. Dutch and Flemish master paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries bring me great delight, curiosity, inspiration and awe. The stories of Banana Yoshimoto and Edgar Allen Poe slay me every time. The work of Edward Gorey is a fantastic source of joy and fantasy while the films of David Lynch, Dario Argento and Jodorowsky excite, influence and intrigue me. Honestly though, my cat Tubs is my biggest inspiration. 

Sarah Wilmer lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in such publications as V Magazine, Vision, Nomenus Quarterly and Surface and she was named to PDN Magazines "30 under 30 to Watch" in 2007.