The Ukrainian-born, Switzerland-based artist explains how she moved from finding photographs to constructing them—and why beauty, ambiguity, and imagination can become forms of cultural survival.

Editor’s note: Julia Wimmerlin’s interview responses were translated from Ukrainian and lightly edited for clarity and length.

For the first decade of her photographic life, Julia Wimmerlin looked outward. Travel supplied the subject; light and timing shaped the image. Her photographs of Japan’s snow monkeys travelled widely, bringing publications and commissions. Yet she draws a careful distinction between professional success and artistic authorship.

“But that was not authorship yet,” she says. “It was attention and craft.”

Wimmerlin—an economist by education and a marketing specialist by training—began photographing after moving to Japan. Years of living across Europe and Asia sharpened her eye for unfamiliar places. Then the pandemic removed travel, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine made straightforward observation feel inadequate. Her practice turned inward, but not away from reality. The visible world remained her material; what changed was what she needed the camera to do with it.

Today, Wimmerlin’s photography moves between figuration and abstraction, document and dream, personal memory and collective history. Controlled blur, saturated colour, water, glass, archives, and physical interventions allow familiar subjects to resist easy recognition. “I no longer photograph what I see,” she says. “I photograph what seeing does to me.”

From Finding Photographs to Making Them

Wimmerlin describes two thresholds in her development. “First came the method, and only then the reason to speak.”

The first arrived in 2020. Living in a small apartment in Hong Kong during lockdown, she no longer had access to the subjects that had sustained her travel practice. She began working with what was close: self-portraiture, domestic space, light, and colour. Instead of waiting for a photograph to appear, she had to construct one.

“The pandemic took travel away, and for the first time in my life I found myself without a subject that arrived on its own,” she says. “That was when I stopped finding photographs and started making them.”

The second threshold came in 2022. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shock gave way to a year-long project, (UN)CORNERED. Wimmerlin photographed 40 Ukrainian women in the corners of their temporary homes in Switzerland, wearing the same clothes in which they had fled. She deliberately avoided heroic narratives. Her aim was identification: she wanted a Swiss or European viewer to look at any of the women and think, That could have been me.

The project changed photography’s function for her. It was no longer primarily a way to admire the world. It became a way to search for answers.

Her development was not a smooth evolution. The pandemic forced her to construct images; the war changed why she made them. A further shift came through working with Dmytro Bohachuk at the Kyiv School of Photography. His teaching in colour theory and contemporary photography helped Wimmerlin remove specificity when it closed an image too quickly.

“My problem was not insufficient ideas, but the desire to say too much,” she says. Blur, anonymous figures, and recurring water became ways to leave the work open. Her own summary is concise: “Travel taught me to look, the pandemic taught me to build, the war gave me a reason to speak, and Bohachuk taught me when to stop speaking.”

The Outsider’s Attention Has an Expiry Date

Living abroad initially taught Wimmerlin how to look. Paris, her first experience of living independently outside Ukraine, frustrated her because everything seemed wrong by comparison with home. Japan produced the opposite lesson: unable to read the signs around her, she learned to infer, observe, and stop comparing.

“Your gaze becomes sharper where you understand nothing,” she says. “Foreignness gives you attention for free, simply because you have arrived.”

But that heightened attention has an expiry date. The outsider is easily drawn to difference and exotic surfaces; eventually, those gestures repeat. For years, Wimmerlin believed a good photograph required a journey. Hong Kong’s lockdowns broke that dependency. With no new landscape available, she had to make her own living room, body, and daily light unfamiliar.

That practice of estrangement has stayed with her. “I no longer make documents of places,” she says. “Everything in my images is real and purely photographic, but the familiar is made to look different—somewhere between memory and imagination.”

This is why ambiguity has become central to Wimmerlin’s visual language. A place that cannot be fully identified is no longer only her place. A figure that refuses to resolve can hold another person’s memory as well as her own. She is never fully at home in the image—and that productive distance keeps her looking.

Beauty, Blur, and the Discipline of Not Explaining

The subject now comes before the frame. Wimmerlin tests an idea by asking whether she can postpone it. If she can, she considers it merely a beautiful idea rather than a necessary theme.

Necessity led to (UN)CORNERED. Stolen Language grew from Ukrainian language classes she had begun for herself, without initially intending to make a project. Disagreement produced Nymphs 2.0, her response to the long tradition of women bathing in Western art—figures repeatedly presented by male artists as objects of desire. Wimmerlin returned to that tradition from the position of a contemporary woman artist, replacing passive visibility with ambiguity and agency.

“Beauty is no longer a sufficient reason,” she says. “It is now a consequence, not a goal.”

Her process nevertheless begins methodically. She builds a visual board of key ideas and possible translations—some literal, some metaphorical, some purely aesthetic. The controlled structure leaves room for material accident. In Stolen Language, she intended to burn a hole through glossy photographic paper with bleach. The reaction instead created a blue-and-yellow stain. It was unplanned, inseparable from the physical object, and close enough to a sign that she accepted it as part of the work.

Wimmerlin applies two tests to an image, neither of them about technical polish. First: does it resemble what she felt, rather than merely what she saw? Second: did most of the vision happen in the camera?

She does not add blur in post-production; there, she adjusts colour. The distinction is ethical as much as technical. “If the blur is made later, it becomes decoration,” she explains. “If it is born at the moment of shooting, it is a decision for which I am responsible.”

Blur changes the viewer’s role. “A sharp image tells you what a thing is. An unsharp one forces you to imagine it.” In Nymphs 2.0, that refusal of perfect visibility also repositions the female body. Soft focus and dissolved form interrupt the expectation that a body should be fully available to the viewer’s gaze. Sensuality remains, but certainty does not.

For Wimmerlin, the final test of whether something personal should become public is simple: can the image work when she is not standing beside it—without a biography, caption, or cultural explanation? A Ukrainian viewer may find the war in a work; another person may see a private loss. Neither reading diminishes the other.

“An image with only one correct meaning is an illustration to a text, not an independent work,” she says.

Imagination as Resistance

Wimmerlin rejects the idea that a constructed or dreamlike image must be an escape. For her, the difference lies not in how closely an invented world resembles ordinary reality, but in the direction of travel.

“Escapism takes you from here to there and leaves you there,” she says. “Imagination works in the other direction: you go there to bring something back here. It is the difference between hiding and going to fetch a tool.”

Her parallel world is made entirely from this one. Water, bodies, light, glass, and a living room transformed into a studio remain materially real and created in camera. She does not draw, composite, or generate the scenes. Reality is her only material; she changes the terms by which it can be seen.

Wimmerlin is equally direct about art as psychological protection. Art Therapy was not metaphorically therapeutic: its self-portraits helped her adjust to the new reality of Ukraine and the wider world. Protection is normal, she argues. The work becomes resistance when something remains for another person—a question, a meaning, a moment of recognition.

Her research into Russification showed how effectively a culture could be weakened by making its language feel shameful and its people feel inferior. Continuing to create culture therefore becomes more than a private coping mechanism.

“A people who continue to create culture cannot be erased,” Wimmerlin says. “When I am asked whether it is shameful to make something beautiful while things are being destroyed at home, I answer that stopping is precisely the result expected of us.”

In this light, the directness of Stolen Language and (UN)CORNERED is not opposed to the dream logic of Nymphs 2.0 or Freefalling. They are different registers used by the same artist to avoid silence.

“The boundary for me is not between reality and imagination,” she says. “It is between silence and expression.”

No Single Channel Builds an Artistic Career

The same refusal of simple answers shapes how Wimmerlin thinks about an artist’s career. “Nothing works alone,” she says. “What works is a chain in which every link looks useless by itself.”

Her large travel and wildlife following did not automatically become a collector base, so she separated her art practice into its own account. Instagram keeps her visible, supports brand collaborations, and makes it easy for someone who encounters the work offline to contact her. It is a point of continuity, not a complete career system.

Her website plays a different role. “A website does not bring people to you; it confirms you,” she says. It gives series, texts, exhibitions, press, and a CV a stable structure. In that sense, a photography portfolio website is a reference rather than merely a storefront: it helps a curator, editor, juror, or collector understand that an image belongs to a sustained practice.

Open calls have introduced Wimmerlin’s work to jurors and editors and forced her to articulate each project clearly. Media coverage has added legitimacy and context, from LensCulture’s presentation of Stolen Language to Réponses Photo’s feature on Nymphs 2.0. Yet sales happen most concretely at exhibitions and fairs, where the photograph is encountered as an object: paper or metal, frame, scale, colour, and sequence.

Personal contact remains the most important link, and it usually begins with physical presence. A collector may first see the work at a fair, verify the wider practice on the website, continue following it on Instagram, and only later begin a conversation. No single channel deserves all the credit.

Her advice to photographers follows the same logic: “Think in series, not individual frames. A single strong image opens no doors. A series proves that you have a language, not just a lucky day.”

A Digital Space Where the Work Can Be Experienced

Wimmerlin describes her main website as a place of reference and verification. Digital Original has the potential to do something different: “It could be a space where the work is experienced, not verified.”

That distinction matters for images in which colour, adjacency, and sequence carry meaning. Wimmerlin found the Digital Original setup simpler and faster than expected. High-resolution works opened immediately—a small technical detail with a large effect, because waiting often means losing the viewer before the image has time to act.

She also valued the way the display preserved space, scale, and colour. In her work, colour is not decoration; it is content. The team’s professional, generous, and human support made the unfamiliar digital process feel manageable.

Her clearest product request is equally revealing: artists need control over the order of works. A portfolio arranged only by date or alphabet misses the visual conversation between neighbouring images. For Wimmerlin, hanging order can require as much thought as selection because sequence is part of authorship.

The new digital art ecosystem is still unfamiliar territory for her, but that uncertainty is part of its appeal. It offers another exhibition space, a possible sales channel, and a way to let the work retain visual force online rather than merely confirming that it exists.

Explore Julia Wimmerlin’s selected digital works on Digital Original or visit her full artist portfolio. Artists and photographers developing their own online presence can also read Digital Original’s practical guide to building an online presence as an artist.