Emily Palm Photography

The Edit

Selected Work

A tighter edit of the images that feel most like my eye: people shaped by place, weathered surfaces, queer signal, ruins, softness, water, stone, city edges, and moments that feel cinematic without asking to be perfect.

Accessible viewing Select any image to view it larger with a written image description. Concise alt text supports screen readers; expanded captions offer mood, composition, and context.

Green-haired portrait against a blue graffiti wall

Person blowing yellow-orange flower petals toward the camera

A person sitting on coastal rocks above open water

Close view of a colorful mosaic architectural column

Portrait framed by a rough brick doorway

Portrait in a red sweater and yellow plaid skirt beside brick, railings, and street signal colors

Rainbow prism painted on a lakeside rock beside open water

Black-and-white portrait focused on bare skin, scars, and outdoor texture

Body, gaze, atmosphere

Bodies / Presence

Portraits in conversation with their surroundings — graffiti, brick, plants, scars, gesture, posture, color, and refusal. I am interested in people with interiority: images that leave the subject with dignity, context, and room to be complicated.

Seated portrait in denim and white, framed by a pale doorway

Soft portrait in a straw hat in an industrial courtyard

Eyes and face partially framed by green leaves

Red-haired portrait seated in a chair against a gray wall

Intimate work in development

After Dark

A forthcoming space for intimate portraits, body studies, nocturnal work, and images that treat skin, shadow, gender, softness, and self-authorship with care. This section will be built slowly, collaboratively, and only with explicit consent from the people pictured.

Consent

Seen, not exposed.

Intimacy here means collaboration, not extraction. Images are made with clear boundaries, shared agency, and room for people to decide how they want to be witnessed.

Body

Soft evidence.

Future work may include queer bodies, scars, fabric, hands, posture, partial nudity, and private atmosphere — less performance, more authorship.

Mood

Night as texture.

Low light, bedrooms, bathrooms, porches, alleys, mirrors, lamps, and the charged quiet of spaces where people become more themselves.

Architecture, travel, texture

Surface / Place

Architecture, landscape, travel, light, water, and the surfaces that hold memory. These images are less about scenery than evidence: how a place carries touch, weather, ornament, distance, time, and secrecy.

Ornate cathedral facade beneath a saturated blue sky

Snowy mountains reflected in a still Alaskan lake

Warm rectangular window shadows falling across a pale interior wall

Stone street opening toward countryside and hills

White lighthouse on a rocky coastline beneath large clouds

Wide panorama of snowy mountains reflected in turquoise water

Ritual, movement, chosen family

Ceremony / Afterparty

The tender, funny, moving parts of a gathering — the kiss, the chaos, the tug-of-war, the soft in-between moment. More documentary than stiff: chosen family, nervous hands, big laughter, ritual, relief, and the seconds people may miss.

Wedding party in a playful tug-of-war moment

Wedding couple embracing in a quiet outdoor moment

Emily Palm

Emily Palm is a St. Louis-based photographer drawn to texture, threshold, and self-possession. Her work moves between portraiture, surface, ceremony, and intimate visual study, with attention to queer presence, embodied softness, and the charged details of ordinary environments.

Her approach is consent-aware, trauma-informed, body-respectful, and collaborative. She is interested in the difference between being looked at and being witnessed.

Inquiries

For portraits, events, weddings, collaborations, print requests, After Dark/body studies, or other creative inquiries, send a note. I am especially interested in work that feels personal, careful, visually strange, queer, and alive.

emilypalm123@gmail.com