Julia Wimmerlin's images are not looked at, but passed through.
Saturated colors, dissolved forms: this Ukrainian photographer based in Switzerland constructs a world apart, where dream and reality merge. Her works behave like paintings and are interpreted like dreams. What strikes you first is the color: deep reds, muted greens, blues that seem to come from nowhere, saturated, almost unreal. The eye is captivated even before understanding what it is looking at. Then comes the blur: outlines fade, female bodies half-dissolve in the light, faces remain in a liminal space. In Julia Wimmerlin's work, vibrant color and blur do not oppose each other, but reinforce one another. One attracts, the other holds you captive. You linger before her images because you can't quite grasp them.
This visual bias is not a mere formal affectation. When the pandemic closed borders, and then war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, photographing the world as it was became unbearable for her. No longer able to confront reality through a documentary lens, she invented. Her images then became a space of inner resistance; not an escape, but a way of reconstructing meaning where reality had fractured. One thinks of what the Surrealists Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington opposed to the chaos of their time, or of the photographer Francesca Woodman: imagination elevated to a vital necessity.
In the series (UN)CORNED – whose title plays on the English verb to corner (To corner) and its opposite—this urgency takes on a direct and overwhelming form. Julia Wimmerlin photographs Ukrainian women refugees in Switzerland, dressed in the clothes they wore the day they fled. Each woman is photographed in a corner, a metaphor for invasion, but none of them feels more cornered. What each woman has packed in her suitcase becomes the heart of the portrait: hard drives containing years of research on Chernobyl, a scarlet lipstick, a teddy bear, a psalter, a saucepan. Objects both trivial and absolute, expressing what language struggles to articulate. The series was notably exhibited at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in June 2025, on the occasion of World Refugee Day.
Her other series explore more intimate territories. In Reverie ou Nymphs 2.0, The female figures seem to belong to a suspended time, somewhere between memory and invention. Color structures the emotional space as much as the composition. In Stolen Language Awarded third place at the Cortona On The Move festival in 2024, the central question is one of identity: how to represent what words can no longer contain? The image takes over with a carefully maintained ambiguity; something that resists any definitive reading.
His work was published in the New York Times National Geographic, GEO, Le Figaro et The Guardian, and exhibited on four continents. In 2026, she is present at photoSCHWEIZ in Zurich, at the Hungry Eye art fair in Rotterdam and at the group exhibition “Visions of Winter” at Galerie La Hune, in Paris.
Julia Wimmerlin's work reminds us that the image can still reinvent reality. Neither document nor fiction, her photographs open up a space where continuing to see becomes possible.
