Sonya Whitefield

Sonya Whitefield is a photographer from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland.

Biography

Whitefield was born in Moy, County Tyrone in 1964 or 1965. After school, she studied Foundation Art at Ulster University, Jordanstown in 1983, where she first became interested in photography. She progressed to study photography at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design between 1984 and 1987.

Works

Whitefield has said that she uses photography "to creatively interpret and communicate personal life experiences. It’s a way of mirroring back conscious and unconscious thoughts around life situations that challenge us all as humans."
She has exhibited in a number of galleries as part of group exhibitions. In 2010 she had a solo exhibition entitled "Journey of the Hysterectic Woman" at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast. The exhibition was described as "not for the squeamish as it creatively records the actual experience of a hysterectomy, including close-ups of surgical stitching and shots of the uterus being carried away for burial in a minuscule coffin." Whitefield also published a book of selected photographs in conjunction with the exhibition.
In 2017, Whitefield embarked on a creative collaboration with the Northern Irish author David Park. Her photographs in response to his novel Travelling in a Strange Land were published on the web and exhibited at the Market Place Theatre, Armagh, in July 2018. Park described how photography was at the heart of his book:
in 2019, one of the photographs from this collaboration, which depicted Whitefield's son's scars, won Juror's Pick for Imaginative Storytelling in the LensCulture Visual Storytelling Awards.