Hidden condition

An ongoing photographic project exploring the intimate yet rarely shared experience of pelvic floor dysfunction after childbirth and its invisible impact on women’s everyday lives, through symbolic still lifes and anonymised portraits.

It’s been seven years since I last went for a run.

I had never been a runner. After giving birth, I wanted to start doing something again, to bring movement back into my body.

Before my first run, I went to the bathroom. Just in case. I put on my sports clothes and running shoes, borrowed my husband’s sports watch, and went out. After a few hundred meters, with every step, I felt warmth between my legs. At first barely noticeable. Then stronger. It spread down my thighs.

It was spring, still cold. The liquid cooled quickly.

I stopped and looked down. On my black leggings, there was a wet patch, visible from the front and the back.

What now?

I stood there, not knowing whether to keep running or turn back. I couldn’t understand what was happening. My body was doing something on its own, without me.

In the end, I turned around and ran home.

When I got home, I called my husband over to look. I took a photo of myself and sent it to a friend. It was absurd. Embarrassing. And at the same time, a little funny.

“This happens after childbirth,” she wrote.

At that moment, I didn’t yet understand that this was more than one embarrassing accident. It was the beginning of a different relationship with my body.

From that day on, I started thinking ahead before doing ordinary things. Where is the nearest toilet? Can I jump? Can I run? Can I take a bus without feeling anxious? My body became something I had to monitor all the time. This constant monitoring became one of the central subjects of my project.

Pelvic floor dysfunction is often invisible from the outside. You can meet a woman, talk to her, live with her, or even love her, and still have no idea how much her body shapes her everyday life.

That is why I chose the title Hidden condition. It refers not only to the medical condition itself, but also to the silence around it. Symptoms such as incontinence, chronic pressure, pain, or organ prolapse can shape movement, self-perception, relationships, and intimacy.

I wanted the project to stay connected to the physical reality of the body without becoming explicit, clinical, or illustrative. I began by listing diagnoses and imagining how their effects might be translated visually. I turned to ordinary objects to create metaphors for bodily processes - holding together the everyday and the intimate, and making pressure, support, fragility, and loss of control tangible without showing the body directly.

This indirect approach allows the still lifes to make the condition visible while leaving space for privacy, ambiguity, and imagination. I did not want to illustrate a diagnosis; my aim was to evoke what it can feel like to live with it.

I wanted to know how other women experienced this, so I invited women interested in the project to complete a questionnaire. I asked about their physical symptoms, everyday limitations, mental health, relationships, and experiences with doctors. Their answers often turned to fear, shame, planning, and the loss of spontaneity. I treated them not as statistics, but as personal testimonies that expanded my own experience into a shared one.

I decided to represent this aspect of the project through portraits. I did not want to hide them completely, but I also did not want to expose them fully. They had shared something very personal with me, and I wanted to treat that with care. For me, this kind of anonymity also reflects the shame around this topic. Many women do not speak about it openly, even with people close to them.

"What helps me is knowing that I’m not alone in this.”

These words, shared by one of the women, are important to me because they sum up the ambition of the project.

I want the project to raise awareness through personal stories, in a way that feels intimate rather than exposing. I hope it encourages people to pause, listen, and reflect. This subject needs closeness, but not spectacle. I also hope it helps more men - partners and husbands - understand what women may be going through, even when it is not visible from the outside.