We’re excited to announce Austin-based photographer, cinematographer, and film producer Sarah Wilson as the 2025 Texas Book Festival poster artist. Her artwork, Big Slide, Santa Elena, has been selected as the official 2025 Festival poster image.
Every year, we select an artist with a strong Texas affiliation whose work reflects the spirit of the Festival, an annual celebration of imagination, creativity, community, and diverse artistic expression. Past artists include Zeke Peña, Jon Flaming, Clemente Guzman, Julie Speed, Keith Carter, and many others throughout the Festival’s 30-year history.
Merchandise featuring the 2025 Festival poster image will be available for purchase at the 30th Annual Texas Book Festival, November 8–9, 2025, and online at www.texasbookfestival.org. TBF Chief Operations Officer Dalia Azim interviewed Wilson about her work and what it means to be the 2025 Festival poster artist.
The poster image is a composite collaboration between my grandfather and me. I’ve used his Kodachrome slide mount, with his handwriting, to frame my photograph of Santa Elena Canyon. The slides have become a passport to a life-changing adventure.
Dalia Azim: Sarah, this is such a cool, layered artwork. Can you talk a little bit about the different components and how you constructed the piece?
Sarah Wilson: A year before he passed, my grandfather gave me three black metal boxes filled with his 35 mm teaching slides. The faded Kodachromes featured images of geologic charts, rock formations, bone fragments, skulls, and landscapes from his annual digs in West Texas and Big Bend National Park. My grandfather, Dr. John A. (Jack) Wilson, was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a world-renowned paleontologist / geologist who was particularly devoted to the West Texas landscape, where he conducted his annual digs in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
The slides spent about a year on my shelf– I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with them, but I knew they had some power, some purpose. Taking a closer look, I realized that my grandfather had photographed some of the exact same locations that I would photograph decades later, when I started to fall in love with the area. It was kind of special to think of him standing on the banks of the Rio Grande, gazing with the same sense of awe at Santa Elena Canyon, towering above.
The poster image is a composite collaboration between my grandfather and me. I’ve used his Kodachrome slide mount, with his handwriting, to frame my photograph of Santa Elena Canyon. The slides have become a passport to a life-changing adventure. I’ve learned about my grandfather’s work as a paleontologist, which inspired my own search for fossils and existential perspective in the West Texas desert, all culminating in the pages of my first book, DIG: Notes on Field and Family.
DA: It seems to me that you experiment a lot with form from project to project. Would you share a little bit about your process and the ways you play with materiality in your art?
SW: My work often shifts in form and medium, depending on the message I’m pushing forward or the story I’m trying to tell. At the beginning of my career, I was all about black and white, medium format, darkroom-printed photography. Then digital cameras came along, which brought me into color, then video, then timelapse, and recently I’ve started dipping back into medium format film. For a project during COVID, I photographed essential women workers and wheat-pasted their portraits, up to 20 ft tall, on the sides of buildings around Austin. For the DIG project, I’ve been using those wheat-pasting skills I learned during ESSENTIALS to create three-dimensional works on wood with my photography. The DIG show has traveled to four Texas galleries and features not only standard framed photographs, but also several canvas pull-down maps inspired by mid-century anatomy posters, bronze and plaster fossil casts, circular photographic portal pieces, and my grandfather’s bolo tie collection.
Lately I’ve been feeling less interested in presenting standard photographic prints, framed behind glass. I’m drawn to pushing beyond the boundaries of the rectangle.
DA: You were a featured author in the 2024 Texas Book Festival with your art book Dig: Notes on Field and Family, and this year you were nominated to be our Poster Artist. Thank you for being part of our story. What has the experience been like for you?
SW: I felt honored to be a featured author for last year’s Book Festival because I know how truly special this annual event is to our community and beyond. To be celebrated for a book about my family history was a great reminder that what seems like the most personal is often the most universal. And it was such a wonderful surprise to be selected as the 2025 TBF Poster Artist. I’m proud to be joining the ranks with so many of my photographic heroes that have been featured over the years.
DA: You have told a lot of Texas stories through your work across mediums, capturing many unique aspects of the state and its people. Do you identify as an artist making work about Texas? Why or why not?
SW: I grew up in Austin, but never felt truly Texan until I lived in New York City for ten years. I loved being there in my early twenties. It was the place I learned about the art world and the magazine world and the fast pace of ambition. But I never felt like the city was the inspiration for my work. I needed open skies and a slower pace in order to talk to people—read their faces and glean their stories. Texas has plenty of stories to tell, both good and bad, and I’m attracted to the friction within its narrative. Same with the landscape . . . it’s not the lush beauty of Maine or the California coastline. It’s temperamental and kind of prickly, but when you are patient with it and you’re in the right place at the right time, you get a real treat.
DA: Which artists have had the biggest impact on your work, and whose art do you turn to for inspiration?
SW: For the most part, I am drawn to work that’s about this country– its tenuous beauty and the struggle to encapsulate all of its differing ideologies. As far as portraiture goes, I often turn to Richard Avedon’s “In the American West” series for inspiration—those photographs make me feel all tingly inside. I was inspired early on by a stunning project by Max Aguilera-Hellweg titled “La Frontera Sin Sonrisa,” a portrait project covering Texas/Mexico border towns. I first saw the work at the El Paso Museum of Art and it lit a fire. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to intern for Mary Ellen Mark when I was in college. She was incredibly dedicated to her work and had such a strong point of view.
I’m also inspired by Sally Mann, Irving Penn, Dan Winters, John James Audubon, Keith Carter, James Evans, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Richard Misrach, and Diane Arbus, among countless others.
DA: What do you like to read? What books have really captured your imagination lately?
SW: I read a mix of fiction, non-fiction and self-improvement. I’m in the middle of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. Before that it was Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, then Crying in H Mart, God of the Woods, and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. But one of my favorite books of all time is The Overstory by Richard Powers. I loved learning about how trees communicate with one another and the humans who dedicate their lives to protecting them.
About Sarah Wilson
Sarah Wilson is a photographer, cinematographer, film producer and member of Go-Valley, the Austin-based film production company she co-founded with her husband, director Keith Maitland. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she balances documentary films and editorial photography assignments with personal and public art projects. Wilson has been on assignment for The New York Times Magazine, TIME, People, The Atlantic, Mother Jones and several other publications, including Texas Monthly, where she is featured on the masthead. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Harry Ransom Center and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and she has received awards at photo festivals in the US and abroad. In 2016 Wilson worked as a cinematographer and executive producer on the shortlisted animated documentary, Tower, winner of the Emmy for Best Historical Documentary, as well as a Critics’ Choice Award for Most Innovative Documentary. In 2022, Go-Valley released Dear Mr. Brody, which Sarah Wilson both lensed and served as a producer.
In her current photographic series, DIG, Wilson explores her grandfather’s life’s work as a paleontologist, inspiring her own search for fossils and existential perspective in the West Texas desert. Before he died, Wilson’s grandfather gave her three black metal boxes filled with faded Kodachromes, his teaching slides from when he was a professor of geology and paleontology at the University of Texas. The images featured geologic charts, rock formations, bone fragments, skulls, and landscapes from his annual digs in West Texas and Big Bend National Park. Holding them up to the light, Wilson realized that she and her grandfather photographed some of the exact same desert landscapes, from the same vantage points, only fifty years apart. This shared connection ignited an adventure and a long-term project, featured in the pages of her first book, DIG: Notes on Field and Family.
