Sarah Palmer is a photographer based in Toronto, Canada. Her work lives between the realms of documentary and fine art, questioning the conventional limits of each world. She explores pop culture and current events with a focus on the subcultures that these gatherings draw in. She is deeply interested in how we navigate ourselves in the world, with recent work exploring the climate crisis and the impact we have on each other and the environment.
Equipped with up to ten cameras at once on a project, her photographic style is unique in that she photographs on film, and composes multiple exposures in-camera, (not made in Photoshop). With a close relationship to the clicks and sounds of the camera's film advance, she can predict where the layering will take place on the film, which is developed as a continuous strip of images. She uses masking tape on the back of the cameras and writes down the shots she takes, allowing her to plan images to pair with one another, saving cameras for specific shots possibly days later. By building layers of stories on the same piece of film, she attempts to make sense of the constructed realities we live in by playing with feelings of surrealness and nostalgia.
She is a National Magazine Awards winner and her work has been published by TIME, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils. Palmer has exhibited internationally, with recent and upc
