Lene Marie Fossen

Lene Marie Fossen (18 August 1986 - 22 October 2019) was a Norwegian photographer and artist.

Personal life and photography

Lene Marie Fossen suffered from Anorexia nervosa since age 10, stating she started to starve in order to prevent growing up.^[1][2]

She started learning photography as a teenager. The main focus of her work was black-and-white portraits of people. A 2017 exhibition of her self portraits depicting the effects of her struggle with anorexia, gained significant attention in Norway.^[3][4] In interviews, and in a TED talk, she described her struggle between creativity and suffering from poor physical health.

She worked on a documentary about her life while taking portrait photos of Syrian refugee children in Greece in 2019.^[5] During this work, she suffered a car accident that caused her additional health issues. She died from the long term effects of her illness, aged 33. The documentary was aired after her death.^[6]

Further exhibitions of her photography art were presented in 2022.^[7] She weighed 25 kg when she died.