Sarah Baley
(1975-)

Photography
Lives and works in New York

Sarah Baley is a photographer born and raised in a Syrian-American family in Brooklyn. She graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the J Paul Getty Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and numerous private collections. She is best known for her Wood series, which is one of the first contemporary art series about the gender queer community.
Much of her work feels like being immersed in a fractured daydream in which the images provocatively turn the lens while holding up a mirror to the viewer. She became interested in cinema at an early age, particularly the works of the French New Wave and Italian neo-realists, as well as American classics. She is also inspired by tenebrous painting and chiaroscuro, Middle Eastern art and poetry.

“These images are hyper-real montages suspended in space. The stories overlap, like memory, they appear and disappear and mix, desynchronize, build and rebuild. Perception and reperception are neither fixed nor defined. They are lucid fantasies and stagings inspired by cinema, poetry, social injustice or stories that gravitate in my mind. I have created most of these works within the structure of a series. Lately, I believe that these narratives and series should be fluid and in motion, using different collected combinations, to reconstruct narratives that tell a more layered story existing in the present. The intersection and impact of time and experience at the origin of the present moment, grown from memory and experience, using photography as a living instrument rather than a collection of moments stopped in capture.” – Sarah Baley

“Sarah’s work liberates identity from the intersectionality of gender, class, race, geography and all the labels that define social normalcy. Her work continues a visual discourse that can be traced from Robert Mapplethorpe to Catherine Opie in her truthful representation of queer culture. And like her photographic predecessors, she uses classicism to depict beauty and maintains the integrity of the craft.” – Grace Moon