Sophia Wilson’s Intimate Portraits of Black Female Bodybuilders in NYC

Words: Upasana Das

Make it stand out

Nicole Stauss stands on the mid-landing of a staircase in six-inch heels with a vacuum cleaner. Clad simply in a sparkly bikini, her biceps bulge and shine as she works the vacuum, staring at the camera with a hint of a smile on her face, her firm abs glowing under the light. In another photograph, Lauren Gripp stares at the camera, standing in the bathroom, as if caught mid-moment before applying gloss on her lips.

These photographs are part of a series documenting black female bodybuilders in NYC, by the photographer Sophia Wilson, which were exhibited at Strada World in September. “I just wanted to show the unexpected,” Wilson noted, recalling the moment she shot Stauss, “These women – they go to the gym, their competitions and that’s where they get photographed normally and nobody sees them at home afterwards.”

For the past few years, much of Wilson’s work has been filmed in personal spaces and homes. Her series Lovers and Friends (2023) captured narratives of gentrification, immigration and the changing facades of New York through memories of her friends and people she street-scouted or came across online, whom she then photographed. When asked about her preoccupation with one’s own room and space, she mused, “I like to know what people are like behind closed doors. Everything is so manufactured these days.” That is also the reason why she likes photographing her friends. “It creates a more intimate image because people really know you and they trust you.” 

However, Wilson wouldn’t call her work documentary, but something that also crosses over to fiction. “I like to worldbuild through my work,” she smiled, “I like the idea of taking the mundane and turning it into the extraordinary. It feels relatable – like a dream.” This series wasn’t photographed in Stauss and Gripp’s homes, but instead in a house Wilson had previously scouted and adored – this worldbuilding, she added, allows her more creative control. 

“It felt fitting,” she said, “To showcase something as extreme as bodybuilding in an area so intimate like a home.” Stauss lives in a single-family house in Brooklyn. “It was actually similar to the location of the photoshoot,” Stauss told me. Gripp too was also reminded of her childhood home due to the shoot location’s old, New York style construction. 

Wilson recalled hitting upon the idea three years ago, in a conversation with her boyfriend, who is also the founder of Strada World. “I’ve been building this idea since then,” she said. Strada had a partnership with Open AI, which gave Wilson access to unreleased software to create the project and while initially the AI was to be used as a tool to make her photographs move, Wilson considered the ethical issues surrounding using the likeness of people with AI and stopped the animation process. “Because a lot of people are coming out with deepfakes and it’s not necessarily right,” she explained, “Instead, I had the AI to do the casting for this. “I had the program search the city to find Black female bodybuilders. I met them (Stauss and Gripp) literally on the day of the shoot.” 

While interviewing Gripp and Stauss for her shoot, Wilson suddenly found herself relating to them about flipping the script in a male-dominated field. For her, entering fashion as a teenager came with its own pressures. “I always felt like I have so much to say, and people will undervalue me just by looking at me,” Wilson noted “So I try to include the most of me as possible in my work.” 

Working with the bright colours of the Y2K era, Wilson feels she is rewriting the unspoken rules of the 2000s when people of colour seldom found themselves before the camera. Being the one of the only Black kids in her grade, in a predominantly white school in uptown New York – who also incidentally lived downtown, meant no one wanted to hang out with her. “It was very isolating,” she recalled, “Everybody’s parents were super rich and famous – except for mine, so I just didn’t fit in very well. Nobody invited me anywhere. I had no friends.”

Gripp recalled Rachel’s call when she explained the shoot would surround exploring themselves through their bodies. “Since I started competing, I view my body as a temple,” Gripp expressed – rest, recovery and nourishing food are offerings to the altar. Every single ounce of hard work matters on stage. “Your energy, your hand movements, your tan, your makeup, your hair, your facial expressions,” she lists, “For the bikini category – my current category, we are judged on muscle fullness and balance.” 

“It felt fitting,” she said, “To showcase something as extreme as bodybuilding in an area so intimate like a home.”

Every bodybuilder’s physique undergoes a metamorphosis in the days leading up to show day. “Many competitors will eat a certain amount of carbs to achieve a specific look,” Gripp continues. She recalled seeing her fiancé’s body change before his first bodybuilding show in 2019, which fascinated her enough to get into the sport herself. While some people love the stage-ready lean and muscular physique, some don’t, noted Stauss. 

“It’s not a sustainable look,” she admitted, “That’s not the look that a bodybuilder carries all year round – it's only for competition.” Having just competed two weeks prior to when she got the call, her body had retained the show look. “I can appreciate my stage-ready body and my normal body,” she said, “They each have their place.”

Before shooting, Wilson chose areas of the house that felt the most lived-in, like the bathroom or the bedroom, like it is in anybody’s home. “Their home life is extremely normal,” added Wilson, “They were talking about how they go home and just chill with their boyfriends – one of them is a mom, I think. They both have full-time jobs in addition to being bodybuilders.” Wilson herself has led a double life throughout school, with classes in the day and shoots at night, when she was too caught up in the fun to realise what she was doing an actual job, and thereafter through college until she dropped out. “I think it’s more common in New York,” she said, “You have such a crazy lifestyle that you can’t even find time to go to sleep at night.”  

In one photograph, Stauss smiles at the camera, scrolling through her phone as she sprawls on a polished wooden table, one leg up in the air. “I love to smile,” Stauss said, “I’m just a happy person in general, so it comes very natural to me. I’m obsessed with that photo – that was my favourite picture.”

Wilson also generally doesn’t work with stoic models. “I feel like nowadays most of my work is an abstract version of a self-portrait,” she said, “It’s telling different parts of the story of my life of being this black girl growing up in New York City.” 

She finished our conversation by telling me that she is working on a book on her coming-of-age, friendships, mental health and overcoming challenges, ‘in a more extreme version’. “My series on bodybuilders is a good starting point for the book,” Wilson said, “I like photographing extremities because I’m a very extreme person. I’m a Gemini. Everybody in my personal life knows this – I feel things so deeply. Every morning, I wake up, it’s either the best day ever or the world’s about to end. I’ve always felt this way.”