Fractured selfshot is a series of photographs that is born out of my struggle to accept my mental illness. As a child of post-soviet space, where mental illness was always very stigmatised, as someone, who was ableist in childhood due to this conditioning and always bragged about being "mentally normal", I was shocked when being 26 years old I was diagnosed with a mental illness. It was hard for me to believe. But photography, the tool I always had, the thing I was taught, is helping me to look at myself from the side.

In these photos, I see my illness, my neurodivergence, my trauma, the fluidity of my gender (tho for some time I was presenting myself as cis woman, but it was only to conform, it was heavily influenced by the sex work that I had to do at that time, in fact, I always had periods when I felt like a boy, but it's not something a typical customer is into, there is a lot of transphobia on web-cam sites and I was afraid to look boyish).

I started shooting this series in 2020 when lockdown started - exactly when I got into sex work. I continue shooting it. 

I also have a separate profile in insta just for this project, where I post the black and white part of it, and accompany it by text on mental health thematics. It's https://www.instagram.com/fractured_selfshot/

Here are both bw and colour shots.

This was one of the first photos in the series and it was shot when lockdown in Germany just began, so early spring 2020. That was how I was feeling - suffocating. Anxiety about the future, fear to catch the new unknown desiase, loss of job were topped with impossibility to see my beloved - we were in different cities, not very far but travelling was almost fully banned, except for if it was an emergency.

Summer 2020, lockdown times. I had a maniacal episode. I felt like I was an epic hero, who rips their burning heart out of their chest and lights the way for people with it, to get out of a deep forest in the night. I lost my job as an event photographer due to lockdown and earned my living with online sex work. While doing this sex work I was also trying to do education among these patriarchal cis-hetero men who were the majority of the audience, and due to my illness I was not capable of understanding that it was not going to work, that my body was just being consumed, like an objects, that they are never going to see the art and the ideas, they are too distracted by my body.