Frida Lisa Carstensen Jersø’s project Frida Forever zooms in on the vulnerable, often invisible inner state of being chronically ill. Tender yet raw, the young Danish photographer’s photos are evocative of both beauty and the relentlessness of life and youth despite of the wounds. 

In 2012, Jersø went into an accident that broke her back and left her paralyzed. In later years, during her subsequent numerous stays in the hospital, the artist photographed herself.

Images of the sterile hospital environment intertwines with the energetic snapshots of youthful life beyond the hospital walls.  It is in the space between being healthy and sick that Fridas Forever takes shape and unveils a state of transition from youth to adulthood in sharp duality of freedom and the limitations caused by disease, leading the viewer to reflect on the impermanence of “being healthy”.

For Jersø, photography has become a necessity to shape her identity in this liminal space. Like a mirror, the fragmented process manifests an attempt to construct a sense of self within a vacuum of normality. Through the lens of the camera, Jersø reshapes her own gaze on illness, as the patient, the photographer and the spectator.