Zimmerman typically assembles nine to twelve images taken at about the same moment into the form of a grid which is used to convey the experience of being at the site. As the multiple images represent the shifting of the eye, or the changes in lighting at the site, the grid format also asserts the work as a mental construct.

While Zimmerman employs the camera to record real-world appearances, places and phenomena, how these records are used is subject to her interpretation of the photographic image as subject to all manner of alteration, combination, and as endlessly malleable. As a demonstration of this idea, one often finds in her work a blurring of the distinction between photography and drawing - one traditionally held to be an instrument of realism, the other of interpretation.

In the Topographies series, Zimmerman exploits the camera as a tool for both representation and abstraction and uses the camera's vision - distinct from human sight -  to freeze time, fix patterns and capture effects of light often invisible to the naked eye.

-Roni Feinstein, 2003

MATRIX    
1.  a rectangular array of expressions that is treated as a single entity and manipulated according to particular rules. 

The simple, rectangular grid is the matrix used for these photographs. Its flexibility - expanding or contracting the number of images (panels) to create the larger image - allows the orchestration of the scale of the final work and the balanced relationship of the panel images to one another.

TOPOGRAPHY    
1. the detailed mapping of the features of an area.
2. a schema of a structural entity reflecting a division into distinct areas having a specific relation relative to one another. 

This series of work began with the 2002 lake images that depict changes in the surface reflections on one area of water over a period of time. Once the images were laid on the work table, it seemed that time had not been captured, but had been liberated. Each single image told only one part of an ongoing story while together they created a different, larger more complex synoptic image.
-Elyn Zimmerman