Inside the Studio: Sonia Braun
Sonia Braun’s photography begins where language often fails.
Her images move through water, memory, family history, trauma, and healing, creating a visual world that feels both intimate and universal. Born in Buenos Aires, Braun is an artist, photographer, psychologist, and open water swimmer whose practice is shaped by the body, the unconscious, and the emotional weight of personal history.
Photography entered her life during a period of deep physical recovery after a severe car accident. What first began as an attempt to see beauty again slowly became a language of transformation. During rehabilitation, water became her first subject — not only as a physical environment, but as a space where pain, memory, and image could shift into something new.
In her series I Was Born Blue / Nací Azul, Braun works with family photographs, water, ice, rust, and broken glass. Memories are not preserved in a fixed state. They float, fade, dissolve, and reappear. Through this process, Braun does not try to erase the past. Instead, she allows it to move, soften, and change form.
Her work invites viewers into what she calls their own “inner ocean” — a place where personal memory, grief, beauty, and transformation can meet.
In this week’s Inside the Studio, Sonia Braun reflects on photography, psychoanalysis, open water, family history, healing, and the power of art to transform what we carry.
Read on to learn more in an exclusive interview with Sonia Braun:
Your interest in photography began during your rehabilitation after a severe car accident. How did that difficult period open a new path for you creatively?
In January 2011, after twelve years in Portland, my family and I were preparing to return to Argentina. On the Friday before the moving company was due to begin packing our home, a severe car accident brought that carefully imagined departure to a sudden halt.
Two months later, I arrived in Argentina profoundly injured, trying to rebuild my life, support my four children through their own transition, and resume my psychoanalytic practice, all while beginning what would become a decade of surgeries and a long and painful rehabilitation process.
Desperate to pull me out of that darkness, a good friend of mine insisted that I join her photography class, if only to see beautiful things again. What began as an attempt to reconnect with beauty gradually became a language.
Having been born with cataracts, I had never imagined photography could be mine. During my rehabilitation in a swimming pool, water became my first subject: a space where the body, pain, and memory could be transformed into images.
Photography did not remove me from what I was living; it taught me how to embrace it differently, transforming experience into meaning.
You are an artist, photographer, psychologist, and open water swimmer. How do these different parts of your life come together in your photographic practice?
I do not experience these as separate parts of my life.
Psychoanalysis has taught me to listen to what is not said and to pay attention to what lies beneath the surface. Photography allows me to make visible what is fragile, hidden, or about to disappear, while art gives me the freedom to transform the image through matter.
I swim in open water whenever I can, mostly when visiting my daughter and grandchildren in Costa Rica. It brings me back to my body and soul, to a state of surrender, rhythm, and uncertainty.
All these ways of being converge in my practice: in my attention to what surfaces, what remains submerged, and what can only be understood by entering it.
Water is described as the primordial element in your images. What does water represent for you: memory, healing, freedom, surrender, or something else?
For me, water holds all of these meanings at once.
It first became a place of physical healing during my rehabilitation, and later a way of working with memory and loss. After losing my brother to suicide, and later my mother, I began immersing family photographs in water.
I watched the images float, soften, fade, and change. Water could hold them and undo them at the same time.
In water, memory moves, dissolves, transforms, and sometimes returns in another form.
In I Was Born Blue / Nací Azul, you describe throwing memories into the water and swimming alongside them. What did this act of letting go allow you to understand about your past?
I came to understand that letting go does not mean forgetting or leaving the past behind.
It means accepting that memory changes, and that I can change alongside it. Water did not erase the past; it softened my need to hold it still.
Through this process, I discovered the transformative power of art: it cannot undo what happened, but it can change what we do with it.
Your work often explores memory, family history, and trauma. How do you decide which memories or personal objects are ready to enter the image?
After my mother died, I had to empty her apartment and bring many of her belongings into my home, including those she had kept after my brother’s death.
Suddenly, I was living among objects and photographs carrying layers of family history and loss.
I do not make the decision in a deliberate way. Some objects remain silent for years; others unexpectedly begin to demand my attention. They enter the work when I feel able to touch and transform them, when they can become more than evidence of my personal history and open onto something new.
Your photographs often feel dreamlike, balancing chaos and calm. How do you create this emotional tension within an image?
I do not consciously try to create that tension.
It emerges from the encounter between the image and the materials I work with. Water, ice, rust, and broken glass introduce movement, chance, and deterioration. I create the conditions, but then I allow the material to act and give up some control.
The calm often comes from the composition, stillness, or beauty of the image; the chaos comes from what happens to it. I am drawn to that moment when an image is still recognizable but begins to dissolve.
For me, it reflects something deeply human: how apparent calm can hold profound disturbance beneath the surface.
You have exhibited internationally, including BAphoto, Photo London Live, the Florence Biennale, and Clio Art Fair. What did participating in Clio Art Fair mean to you, and how did audiences respond to the emotional and healing layers of your work?
Participating in Clio Art Fair allowed me to experience my work through the eyes of an international audience.
Before explaining it, I love hearing what it evokes in each viewer. Their personal and unexpected responses enriched my creative process and reminded me that deeply personal work can open a shared emotional space.
Your work invites viewers to “dive into their own inner ocean.” What do you hope people carry with them after experiencing your photographs?
Artists such as Ishiuchi Miyako, Jo Spence, Nan Goldin, Diana Markosian, and others have helped me understand how art can turn pain and personal history into something new.
I hope viewers may recognize something of their own within my work — and perhaps come away slightly transformed.
Sonia Braun’s photographs do not offer memory as something fixed. They treat it as a living material.
In her work, the past does not stay still. It floats, breaks apart, softens, returns, and transforms. Water becomes both witness and collaborator, holding what is painful while also allowing it to change. A photograph is no longer only an image. It becomes an event, a gesture, a release.
What makes Braun’s practice so moving is its honesty. She does not separate beauty from pain, or healing from loss. Instead, she allows them to exist together. Her images suggest that transformation is not always dramatic. Sometimes it happens slowly, through contact: a photograph touching water, a memory touching the body, a viewer touching something unnamed within themselves.
Her background as a psychologist gives her work a deep sensitivity to what remains hidden. Her life as an open water swimmer gives it rhythm, surrender, and movement. Her artistic practice brings these forces together, creating images that feel submerged between the visible and the emotional.
Through I Was Born Blue / Nací Azul and her wider body of work, Braun reminds us that healing is not about erasing what happened. It is about learning how to carry it differently.
Her photographs invite us to enter the water with her — not to escape the past, but to meet it in another form.
You can learn more about Sonia Braun and her work via these links: Instagram: @soniabraunphoto
Website: Sonia Braun
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