Delhi Photo Festival 2015 : Claudia Gori's "My name is Camilla and I love my Life" series

Claudia studied Journalism at La Sapienza University in Rome and photography at the CSF Adams in Rome. In 2014 she attended the International Program in Photojournalism and Advanced Visual Storytelling at the Danish School of Media and Journalism.

It’s the curiosity for the unknown and empathy towards human beings that drive her into her photographic projects. Through photography, she creates a playground for identification of feelings, focusing on psychological and social conditions. Her creative nature brings her to mix different languages and media to tell the stories she’s interested in Camilla with her twins Agnes and Esther.

Camilla is 33 years old and she’s affected by Muscular Dystrophy since she was 3 years old. Muscular Dystrophy is a genetic neuromuscular disease characterized by progressive skeletal muscle weakness and death of muscle cells and tissue.

For women affected by this disease, pregnancy is a hard choice. Apart from the chances of transmitting the genes of the disease to the children, pregnancy can cause a worsening of the syndrome with increased muscle weakness.

Camilla Nielsen has three kids: Ella, 3, and twins, Agnes and Esther, born 7 months ago, in Randers, Denmark. Camilla’s body is in a worse condition than before the pregnancies.

She often gets tired, she can’t lift her children and needs help twelve hours per day, but when she looks back at the decisions she took putting herself to risk, she feels she did the right thing. She has always wanted to experience the joy of motherhood, as she’s always wanted to lead a
normal life.

When Camilla wrote her story, her first sentence read: “My name is Camilla and I love my Life.”

This isn’t a story about disability but about being a woman, a mother and a girlfriend struggling everyday with something that makes everything more difficult.

Claudia studied Journalism at La Sapienza University in Rome and photography at the CSF Adams in Rome. In 2014 she attended the International Program in Photojournalism and Advanced Visual Storytelling at the Danish School of Media and Journalism.

It’s the curiosity for the unknown and empathy towards human beings that drive her into her photographic projects. Through photography, she creates a playground for identification of feelings, focusing on psychological and social conditions. Her creative nature brings her to mix different languages and media to tell the stories she’s interested in Camilla with her twins Agnes and Esther.