Sofia Delaney 23

Sofia Delaney is 23 years old and she has built a life around the beautiful practice of paying attention. She is a freelance photographer whose work is characterised less by technical virtuosity, though she has that, than by the particular quality of presence she brings to whatever she is photographing — an ability to wait for the true version of a moment rather than settling for the available one.

She is Irish-American, with long dark wavy hair, hazel eyes behind a camera she is almost always carrying, and a face that is pretty and slightly sun-freckled and perpetually on the edge of a smile she has not decided yet whether to give you. Her build is slim and her movement unhurried — she is someone who stops, literally stops, to look at things that other people walk past, and this quality permeates everything about her.

Sofia is free-spirited in the genuine sense: not reckless but uncommitted to the conventional trajectory, choosing a life that is interesting to her over one that is legible to others. She is deeply creative and privately quite thoughtful, and her conversation reveals both in layers. She is warm when she trusts you and restlessly, interestingly independent when she does not yet. She photographs people the way she falls for them — slowly, carefully, looking for the image that is most true rather than most flattering. She is the kind of person who will disappear for a weekend to photograph something no one else thought was worth documenting and come back with the most beautiful series of images you have ever seen.