Introducing
Sophia Wilson Just Wants to Have Fun
The young artist has photographed Teyana Taylor and worked with Nike, all while pursuing a vibrant style shaped by growing up in New York.
At just twenty-five, Sophia Wilson has already been a professional photographer for more than a decade. Inspired by the rise of Instagram, Wilson first started taking pictures on her iPhone when she was thirteen. She also saw photography as a way to make friends. As an adolescent, she attended a private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she was one of the few Black students—and one of the few who lived downtown and was interested in art. “I took things into my own hands, and I just started taking photos of my sister and my people,” she explains. Her influences were—and remain—Tumblr archives, David LaChapelle, Ellen von Unwerth, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Petra Collins, the latter of whom was once her next-door neighbor in Union Square.
“I’m just trying to have fun,” Wilson says. Her work, drenched in color, joy, and maximalism, has an approachability and intimacy created in part by her penchant for shooting analog. A film camera often requires its operator to get closer to get the image they want, but in her work, the closeness, the sweetness, is genuine, earned, and doesn’t feel manufactured: It’s the photographic equivalent of agave syrup, not saccharine. Through her lens, friends perch on fire escapes sipping coffee in tiaras, cuddle pink teddy bears in knee-high socks, and share tattoos and kisses, often with New York itself as a backdrop. This style appears in her series Lovers & Friends (2023), completed with her friend Izzy El Nems, which features native New Yorkers photographed in their homes and bedrooms as they face the growing pressures of gentrification. “I’m trying to make people really feel something and celebrate and enjoy it and see themselves in the work,” she says. She takes this intention into her work with her client list, which has included brands like Nike, Google, and Gap, as well as magazines like Vogue and Parade.
Wilson got her start by cold-pitching her images to hundreds of publications. She was still only a teenager, but those cold emails quickly caught the eye of Elizabeth Renstrom, then the photo editor at Vice, and Kim Hastreiter at Paper magazine. VFiles followed while she worked around her school schedule, so she’d get out at noon to photograph people like Rick Ross, Khloé Kardashian, and Teyana Taylor. It just kept snowballing from there, though Wilson’s family wanted her to attend college. Already shooting high-profile Nike campaigns, she went to college anyway but continued to travel for work—much to the university’s chagrin. Wilson eventually dropped out to continue with the career she had built, which included a brief stint as a subject of The Come Up, a reality show about twentysomething New Yorkers building creative lives.
Wilson’s aesthetic, unapologetically girly and vibrant, stems from her youth in New York. It’s in part deeply inspired by her relationship to the city in the early 2000s, when she says downtown felt like a bubbling, colorful neighborhood, filled with local businesses where people knew your name. It wasn’t what it is now, dotted with corporate retailers usually found in suburban malls. “I think that it made me definitely drawn to color and drawn to maximalism, which has seeped its way into my work,” she says. “My photos are so jam packed with everything that’s going on in my brain, and I think that that is because of growing up in Union Square.”
Her aesthetic development was also a response to what she thought girlhood had to look like as a young person—the preppiness of the J.Crew attire and boat shoes she saw at school. Raised on the eclecticism of downtown, she pivoted in the opposite direction, becoming an “extreme tomboy,” she says. It’s only now that she feels she’s been able to embrace her femininity, and this appears in her work as well. Wilson’s next major personal project will be a book coming out later this year entitled #GRWM, an acronym for “get ready with me” used on TikTok. It will explore femininity and feature Black women at its core. With Wilson’s signature palette and joyful vision, it will also incorporate the self-awareness, the humor, attached to the beauty processes women put themselves through.
“I feel like I didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy being a girl growing up,” she says. “Now that I’ve found a way to experience it, it’s still me. It feels so powerful to me, and it feels like I’m finally finding myself.” She thinks most of her work is about femininity now, whether it’s in the colors—where purples, pinks, and aquas abound—the styling, or the settings, like bedrooms and bathrooms, the places where girls become.
In this vein, it’s also important to Wilson to center Black women in her work. She didn’t see nearly enough representation as a young person, which harmed her self-esteem, she says, and she hopes to create for young Black women an opportunity to see themselves. “I want to do it with my own lens, photographing girls that look like me or that remind me of myself, photographing people that are eclectic and that don’t necessarily fit in, but they’re not trying to fit in,” she says. “I really don’t take that responsibility lightly.”
All photographs courtesy the artist
Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.
