by Marissa Friedman
July 22, 2026
“If cows didn’t like mustard there wouldn’t be any movies at all.”
When student Sophia Chefalo (SMACT ‘26) first encountered the claim in a text about photographic history, she stopped in her tracks.
The seemingly strange claim led her down an unexpected path through nineteenth-century chemistry, Kodak archives, agricultural science, animal biology, industrial history, and the material foundations of photography itself. She learned that gelatin — derived from animal hides and bones — played a crucial role in photographic film production, and that compounds created when cows grazed on mustard plants could influence the sensitivity of photographic emulsions. What began as a curious footnote became the basis for a larger investigation into the hidden systems that shape the images we make and consume every day.
For Chefalo, these kinds of connections don’t distract from her artistic practice: they are the practice. Part artist, part humanities scholar, part media theorist, and part historian of technology, Chefalo arrived at the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT searching for a space where ideas could move freely across and between disciplinary boundaries.
Prior to ACT, she studied fine art photography as an undergraduate. While she enjoyed the work, she increasingly found herself researching and pulling from fields beyond art history and photographic theory. “I realized the photographic work I was producing was being supported by research outside that field,” she says. The questions driving her practice were being shaped by philosophy, science, semiotics, media studies, and history.
What attracted her to ACT was its openness: an environment where artistic research did not need to remain confined within a single discipline. “There was a recognition that there were a lot of conceptual overlaps in the way abstract thinking presents in art and science and math,” she explains. That flexibility has become central to her work. While many artists use photography as a medium, Chefalo is increasingly interested in a more fundamental question:
What is photography, exactly?
Images courtesy of Sophia Chefalo.
Her thesis challenges some of the assumptions embedded within that question. Rather than treating photography primarily as a technology — a camera, a film negative, a digital image — she proposes understanding it as something broader: a methodology.
“I’d like to see photography as a logic of preservation that’s not exclusive to the technology of it,” she says. Central to her research is the idea that photography is less a specific medium than a way of organizing information about the world. Drawing from history, philosophy, and media theory, she identifies three principles that underlie photographic thinking: fixation, survey, and compression.
Fixation concerns time, the desire to preserve what is fleeting and create permanence from transience. Survey relates to space and the impulse to document, capture, and claim knowledge about the world. Compression describes the process of translation itself: reducing complex realities into forms that can be stored, transmitted, and interpreted.
Taken together, these principles extend far beyond the camera. For Chefalo, photography is not simply the production of images. It is a broader cultural logic that shapes how we preserve memory, construct evidence, and make meaning.
Images courtesy of Sophia Chefalo.
That perspective has led her to examine everything from nineteenth-century photographic theory to Civil War photography and contemporary debates about artificial intelligence.
One of the historical figures she studied is Alexander Gardner, whose influential Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War helped shape public understandings of the conflict. While photographs are often treated as objective records, Gardner’s work reveals how photographs have always been subjective: entangled with interpretation, narrative, and persuasion.
“We put a lot of expectations on the camera and the function of photography in a way that’s limiting us,” Chefalo says. Photography’s perceived objectivity, she argues, comes in part from the fact that images appear to be produced mechanically. Because a camera records information through an apparatus, viewers often assume the resulting image is free from bias or interpretation. Yet photographs have always been shaped by choices, limitations, and systems of representation.
The questions raised by artificial intelligence, then, are not entirely new.
Today, concerns about synthetic imagery have led some commentators to declare that photography is dead. Chefalo sees these claims as part of a much longer historical pattern.
Instead, she argues, the emergence of AI presents an opportunity to rethink what photography has always been. The technology may be changing, but many of the underlying questions remain remarkably consistent. How do images create meaning? Why do we trust them? What counts as evidence? How do visual technologies shape our understanding of reality? These questions have occupied photographers, artists, theorists, scientists, and historians for nearly two centuries.
Images courtesy of Sophia Chefalo.
At ACT, Chefalo has found a community where those conversations can happen across disciplines. Collaborating with people from different fields has expanded both her research and her artistic practice, allowing her to connect technical, historical, and philosophical modes of inquiry.
That interdisciplinarity is visible even in her studio work. In one recent project, she developed a black-and-white film developer derived from mustard seeds, drawing directly on her research into the overlooked material histories of photography. The project combines chemistry, environmental concerns, historical research, and image-making in a single investigation.
Yet for Chefalo, the goal is never simply to uncover obscure facts. Instead, she is interested in how those histories change the way we think.
Photography, she believes, still has unexplored possibilities; not because its technologies are new, but because our understanding of them continues to evolve. For Chefalo, that means looking beyond the image itself and asking larger questions about preservation, memory, evidence, and knowledge. In doing so, she is helping redefine photography not merely as a medium for making pictures, but as a framework for understanding how we record and interpret the world.
“It’s a medium that I have a tremendous amount of love and respect for,” she says. “I want to see what else it can do.”
