SOFIA

About SOFIA

Active from 2014 until 2018, SOFIA was a women’s photography collective whose mission was to inspire, educate and connect women working in photography.

The Beginning

SOFIA had its beginnings in the early summer of 2014.

We wanted a community for women working in photography and decided to start a collective. Which was great except that we didn’t know that would look like. What did it mean to be a collective? What would we do?

As commercial photographers, we were proud to have made our living through the art of transforming ideas into images. And while we all enjoyed the process of collaboration that came with the territory, we had to also acknowledge that the seeds for a lot of the work we were creating originated with our clients.

So the real driving force was that we each wanted to return to what first drew us to photography. We wanted to deepen our sense of personal connection to the work we were making. We wanted to stretch and challenge ourselves. And we wanted to do it with other women.

The Women Who Started SOFIA

SOFIA Presents Bad Behaviour

In 2016, SOFIA had its official debut at the 20th annual Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto, Canada, featuring the work that each member had created in the two years that lead up to the exhibition.

Artscape Youngplace | Toronto, Canada | May 16th - June 4th, 2016

Curated by Clare Vander Meersch

Press

SOFIA was featured in The Fader, CBC Arts, The Toronto Star, Applied Arts Magazine and Ryerson Review of Journalism.

Mentorship

In 2017, SOFIA launched its mentorship program.

For one year, participating members of SOFIA mentored 11 emerging women photographers, with the goal to offer ongoing support and guidance in whatever area the participant expressed a desire for, as well as help them to discover and develop their voice as a photographer. The program was open to photographers worldwide and included participants in Canada, the USA, and France.

Boundless Love

As part of the 2018 CONTACT Photography Festival and in partnership with the Bad Girls Collective, SOFIA mounted a pop-up exhibition entitled, Boundless Love.

2014 - 2018

In those four years, I’ve had four addresses, in three cities, across two countries. And my story was just one of eight.

A lot happened in our time together. We witnessed each other’s beginnings and endings. Big life changes occurred alongside the quotidian. We all worked many long days in our attempts to continue delivering amazing work for our clients while also trying to make time and space for our own creativity. Through it all, we supported each other and we pushed each other. We were both catalysts and witnesses to each other’s transformations.

As beautiful as it all was, it was also a lot of work. Coordinating the mercurial schedules of 8 busy photographers was an ever-present challenge. While it was incredibly rewarding to mount personal-edge-pushing exhibitions and develop initiatives like the mentorship program, it also required a lot of time, energy and commitment.

So, at the end of 2018, I made the difficult decision to step away from SOFIA.

Being a part of this collective was life-changing for me.

I am and will always be proud of the work that SOFIA did and of what we were able to create together. I am deeply thankful for all that I have learned from this experience and am especially grateful to the women of SOFIA, for being so generous with their time, love and energy. I am who I am because of us.