Sophia Chefalo


Sophia’s practice emerges from photography but deliberately pushes beyond its conventional limits, treating the medium as a launching point for unprecedented forms of image-making. She creates conceptual cameras that fracture temporal continuity, questioning what photography can become rather than what it has been. Working in photography’s “zone of relativity,” her approach combines historical techniques with critical ethnography to reveal how images both disclose and erase, demonstrating how meaning emerges from the tension between presence and absence in ways that fundamentally reimagine how visual experience might shape our perception of time and reality.
 

2026 Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology at Massachusetts Institue of Technology  

2024 Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honors in Fine Art: Photography at the University of the Arts London 

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Invisible Decision 

After a woman began selling her non-rent-paying boyfriend’s belongings, I acquired his digital camera—unknowingly inheriting eight SD cards dense with another person's documented life. These images have become surrogate experiences for my own absent archive, raising questions about what happens when private documentation becomes public artifact. The frame promises to preserve and display, but stripped of context, what am I actually protecting? This work explores how photographs circulate between intimacy and commodity, examining the uncanny relationship that emerges when someone else's memories become your inheritance.

Walnut and Digital Print 
43x50x19 cm
06/10/2024