"How Illness Shapes My Photography”

How restricted time and space reshape my creative process.

Since 2024, my autoimmune condition has been quietly reshaping the rhythm of my life and the way I photograph the world. I have lived with this illness since I was sixteen, and every few years it returns, pushing me a few steps back on my path. May 2024 was no exception. I had planned a long‑awaited photo trip to the Italian Dolomites — a journey I knew would enrich my landscape portfolio — but when the symptoms returned, I had to cancel it on my doctor’s advice. Health rarely negotiates, even with our deepest passions.

Although my platelet counts stabilised for a short while, the relief didn’t last. A few months later, I found myself hospitalised in a haematology–oncology ward, and around the same time I was diagnosed with CVID, a disorder that leaves me vulnerable to infections. What followed was the longest sick leave of my life — six months at home, with limited energy and even more limited freedom. As a photographer, it felt like being locked inside a space too small for all the ideas, plans, and landscapes I carried in my head.

Fatigue, lack of motivation, and a deep mental heaviness settled in. Even after returning to work in March 2025, reconnecting with photography was difficult. Long‑term medication had created an unexpected resistance to picking up the camera, and I struggled to find my inner rhythm again. A few opportunities slipped away — even the wild garlic season I love to photograph vanished in unusually warm weather. Only a spontaneous trip to the forest at the end of May brought back a moment of clarity and reminded me why I photograph at all.

Autumn offered another meaningful image, a brief sense that things were returning to normal. But in December 2025, my illness resurfaced once more, and I found myself back on sick leave, starting treatment again. It was frustrating, of course. But this time, I decided to approach it differently.

With restricted hours and the need to stay home, I began creating small daily rituals — rest, reading, and quiet creative work. Because I love abstract photography of leaves and textures, I turned to what I had around me: houseplants, macro details, and the delicate structures of frost on winter windows. These small home projects became a way to stay connected to nature, even when I couldn’t walk among the trees.

This period has given me time to rethink my website, explore new local locations for the future, and search for creative challenges that push my boundaries from within the walls of my home. Illness continues to shape my photography, not by taking it away, but by forcing me to look closer — to find meaning in smaller worlds, and to rediscover the forest in details. What illness takes away in distance, it returns in depth — and that depth continues to shape the way I see the world.

"Botanical geometry"