Sophia Wilson Simply Desires to Have Enjoyable

At simply twenty-five, Sophia Wilson has already been knowledgeable photographer for greater than a decade. Inspired by the rise of Instagram, Wilson first began taking footage on her iPhone when she was 13. She additionally noticed pictures as a method to make buddies. As an adolescent, she attended a non-public college on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the place she was one of many few Black college students—and one of many few who lived downtown and was inquisitive about artwork. “I took things into my own hands, and I just started taking photos of my sister and my people,” she explains. Her influences had been—and stay—Tumblr archives, David LaChapelle, Ellen von Unwerth, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Petra Collins, the latter of whom was as soon as her next-door neighbor in Union Square.

Sophia Wilson, Talya & Tyler, 2023, from the collection Lovers & Friends

Sophia Wilson, Cam & Pat, 2023, from the collection Lovers & Friends

“I’m just trying to have fun,” Wilson says. Her work, drenched in shade, pleasure, and maximalism, has an approachability and intimacy created partially by her penchant for capturing analog. A movie digital camera usually requires its operator to get nearer to get the picture they need, however in her work, the closeness, the sweetness, is real, earned, and doesn’t really feel manufactured: It’s the photographic equal of agave syrup, not saccharine. Through her lens, buddies perch on fireplace escapes sipping espresso in tiaras, cuddle pink teddy bears in knee-high socks, and share tattoos and kisses, usually with New York itself as a backdrop. This model seems in her collection Lovers & Friends (2023), completed together with her buddy Izzy El Nems, which options native New Yorkers photographed of their properties and bedrooms as they face the rising 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 together with her consumer checklist, which has included manufacturers like Nike, Google, and Gap, in addition to magazines like Vogue and Parade.

Sophia Wilson, Personal, 2022

Sophia Wilson, Chloe Cherry, 2025

Wilson acquired her begin by cold-pitching her photographs to tons of of publications. She was nonetheless solely a youngster, however these chilly emails shortly caught the attention of Elizabeth Renstrom, then the photograph editor at Vice, and Kim Hastreiter at Paper journal. VFiles adopted whereas she labored round her college schedule, so she’d get out at midday to {photograph} folks like Rick Ross, Khloé Kardashian, and Teyana Taylor. It simply stored snowballing from there, although Wilson’s household needed her to attend faculty. Already capturing high-profile Nike campaigns, she went to school anyway however continued to journey for work—a lot to the college’s chagrin. Wilson finally dropped out to proceed with the profession she had constructed, which included a short stint as a topic of The Come Up, a actuality present about twentysomething New Yorkers constructing inventive lives.

Wilson’s aesthetic, unapologetically girly and vibrant, stems from her youth in New York. It’s partially deeply impressed by her relationship to the town within the early 2000s, when she says downtown felt like a effervescent, colourful neighborhood, full of native companies the place folks knew your title. It wasn’t what it’s now, dotted with company retailers often present 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.”

Sophia Wilson, Quen Blackwell, 2024, from the collection #GRWM

Sophia Wilson, Quen Blackwell, 2024, from the collection #GRWM

Her aesthetic growth was additionally a response to what she thought girlhood needed to seem like as an adolescent—the preppiness of the J.Crew apparel and boat sneakers she noticed in school. Raised on the eclecticism of downtown, she pivoted in the other way, changing into an “extreme tomboy,” she says. It’s solely now that she feels she’s been capable of embrace her femininity, and this seems in her work as nicely. Wilson’s subsequent main private mission might be a guide popping out later this 12 months entitled #GRWM, an acronym for “get ready with me” used on TikTok. It will discover femininity and have Black girls at its core. With Wilson’s signature palette and joyful imaginative and prescient, it would additionally incorporate the self-awareness, the humor, hooked up to the wonder processes girls put themselves by.

“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 or not it’s within the colours—the place purples, pinks, and aquas abound—the styling, or the settings, like bedrooms and bogs, the locations the place ladies change into.

In this vein, it’s additionally essential to Wilson to heart Black girls in her work. She didn’t see practically sufficient illustration as an adolescent, which harmed her shallowness, she says, and he or she hopes to create for younger Black girls a possibility 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.”

Sophia Wilson, from the collection Black Female Bodybuilders, 2024

Sophia Wilson, from the collection Black Female Bodybuilders, 2024

Sophia Wilson, Lula & Michael, from the collection Lovers & Friends

Sophia Wilson, Lula & Michael, from the collection Lovers & Friends

Sophia Wilson, Sukiibaby, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Sukiibaby, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Angel & Armani, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Gabby Richardson at dwelling, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Amy & Jules, 2023, from the collection Lovers & Friends
All pictures courtesy the artist

Sophia Wilson, Sasha, Jess, Toshi, Alex, Nya & Faith, 2024, from the collection Lovers & Friends

Read extra from our collection “Introducing,” which highlights thrilling new voices in pictures.