Grad’s hard-won image of Celine Dion scores top 100 honour
Sarah Palmer travelled to Las Vegas in 2019 to photograph Celine Dion’s final show there. She captured her super fans, her performance and even her wax statue at Madame Tussauds.
Being included in TIME Magazine’s Top 100 photos of 2019 for the Celine Dion photo I took for The Walrus (external link) was really exciting. Celine Dion was ending her residency in Las Vegas, and I had always wanted to photograph this powerful female artist who I grew up listening to and admiring. I thought the energy around her shows would be really good to photograph, as well.
The Walrus story is about how Dion has invigorated Las Vegas, and how she’s become somewhat of an institution there. I wanted to pair her as an icon—using her wax figure at Madame Tussauds—with her performing her last show there.
Her team wasn’t giving out media passes for her final show, so The Walrus bought me a ticket.
Front row seats were $2,000 to $3,000 each, so I was sitting further up in the auditorium.
I had to figure out how I was going to get down to the front to photograph her, so I went on Celine Dion chat rooms and fan pages and met up with some superfans in Las Vegas. They told me that during one of her last songs, “To Love You More,” the superfans rush to the stage and the security guards can’t stop them.
So I planned for that and waited in the area where you leave the auditorium to go to the bathroom. When the song started, I ran to the stage and I was there for a couple of songs before I got kicked out. That’s how I got that one photo of her close to the front of the stage.
Sarah Palmer graduated from Ryerson in 2008 and is based in Toronto. She focuses on the relationship between place, memory and cultures on the cusp of change and composes multi-frame exposures in camera. Photo by Amy Powell.
I shoot on film, using multi-frame exposures in-camera, so I have to plan out the compositions I want ahead of time. Earlier in the day, I had taken the photo of the wax figure first, and I knew it was going to be a decent shot, so I was saving it to pair with a shot from the show.
When I take a photo, I know exactly how much to advance the film and how much I’m going to be overlapping the next frame. Most shoots span a few days so I carry up to 10 small Holga cameras. I write down what I shot on the back of each one, on masking tape, and choose what to merge together.
When I was about 21 or 22, I was taking pictures on a family vacation and accidentally took a double exposure. I thought it was interesting and I really liked shooting that way. In memories, time and things get jumbled up together, and I wanted to represent that in the way I shoot.
I’m also into photographing how people gather and act around big events, more than the main event itself. I’ve shot at events like the Pyeongchang Olympics, Donald Trump rallies, the Republican National Convention and Trump’s inauguration for my coverage called Drunk on Trump, which views the Trump phenomenon from the perspective of an outsider.
There’s often so much to see and hear at big events that you get lost in focusing on one particular thing. I want viewers to not only see what it’s like to be at these events, but to feel it too.
Follow Sarah @sarahpalmerphoto (external link) .
This story was first published in the summer edition of Ryerson University Magazine (external link) .