In 2012 a bridge railing gave way and Frida Lisa Carstensen Jersø fell four and a half metres onto asphalt, breaking her back. She has used a wheelchair since. Six years later, doctors found a cellular abnormality that produces large deposits of dead calcium, and much of her adult life has been spent moving in and out of hospitals: more than a hundred operations, along with other treatments and radiation therapy. Frida Forever takes its scale from that continuing situation.

The photographs were made largely where she was — hospital rooms, corridors, the equipment and routine of care, and herself inside them. Set beside these are staged compositions and looser snapshots, and images that follow her passage from youth into adulthood. Brought together, the sequences hold two conditions in view at once, the freedom of being young and the constraints of being ill, and decline to resolve one into the other. The camera here is not a witness arriving from outside; it is hers.

Carstensen Jersø works without sentimentality about the body’s vulnerability, and without hurry to conclude what that body can still do. The book asks what it is to be ill, young and capable at the same time, and treats the hospital as a place of ordinary life rather than only of crisis.

Disko Bay published the book in February 2025 as a hardcover of 208 pages, 17 by 22.7 centimetres, with text in Danish and English. Maija Tammi contributes an essay; Spine Studio is responsible for the design. The print run is 750 copies, a figure that reflects the scale of an independent photography list rather than any claim about scarcity.

For a collector, the interest lies in how the material has been assembled: photographs accumulating across years of medical treatment, an authorship that is first-person throughout, a bilingual European co-publication, and a design that treats the sequence as an argument. Among recent photobooks that place illness and disability at the centre of photographic self-representation rather than at its margins, this is one to read closely.