Lene Marie Fossen – Making the Invisible Visible

Lene Marie Fossen’s self-portraits are brutally honest and deeply poetic. Through the lens of her camera, she documented her battle with anorexia – not to evoke sympathy, but to make the unbearable visible. Her art is both intensely personal and profoundly universal: a story of vulnerability, resistance, and human dignity.

Lene Marie Fossen (1986–2019) was a Norwegian photographer who used her own body and illness as the subject of her artistic work. She began photographing at the age of 15, and despite her young age, she quickly developed a unique visual language marked by powerful presence, quiet drama, and classical lighting.

Fossen’s works raise questions about control, suffering, and how society views illness. In her self-portraits, she turned the camera toward herself – both literally and metaphorically – allowing the viewer to come close, sometimes uncomfortably so. She did not want to be hidden or romanticized, but truly seen.

In Me You We – Exploring Human Behaviour, her photographs and the documentary serve as a painful but important reminder of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t always cooperate – and of the importance of seeing the human being behind the diagnosis.

• Works in the exhibition
  Five untitled self-portraits from 2017: Untitled
• The documentary Self Portrait (Selfportrett), about and featuring Lene Marie Fossen. The film was produced by Margreth Olin and directed by Margreth Olin, Katja Høgseth, and Espen Wallin. It was released in 2020.