Sandra Kosh’s Latest Series: Making Art When Nothing Feels Right

There’s nothing polished about Sandra Kosh’s work. No filters, no illusions, just light, skin, and the quiet noise of being alive.

The Ukrainian photographer and visual artist, known as TorriPhoto, turns her camera toward herself like a mirror that doesn’t flatter. Her latest series feels raw and necessary, not made to please, but to stay awake. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t perform emotion; it bleeds it.

Kosh builds her language out of simplicity, natural light, stripped-down space, the kind of silence that hums. She doesn’t chase perfection; she listens to what the body has to say when no one’s watching. You can sense her background in psychology underneath it all, the way she studies tension, breath, the tiny shifts between fear and acceptance.

There’s a conversation happening in her images: between body and landscape, weight and wind, fragility and persistence. It’s not about beauty, at least not the decorative kind. It’s about truth, raw, unpolished, sometimes uncomfortable, always alive.

Made in wartime Ukraine, these images carry a physical kind of honesty. The body becomes memory, confession, shelter. You feel the fatigue, the longing, the small sparks of hope that survive even when everything else burns out.

Sandra Kosh doesn’t just shoot nudes, but what it means to exist inside a body, to feel it ache, to feel it change, to watch it keep going anyway. Her work isn’t asking for understanding. It’s asking for presence.

There’s a rare kind of freedom in that, the kind that comes when you stop trying to look beautiful and start trying to feel real.

Below, Sandra Kosh opens up about the series, the body, and what it means to stay human when everything else breaks.

Cornfield shooting: Making Art When Nothing Feels Right

I had been planning to photograph myself in a cornfield since summer, when it was still lush, green, and full of light. But somehow, it never came together. There was always something in the way: no time, no energy, no right state of mind.

By the time I finally returned to the idea, the season had already turned. The air was cold, the fields dry and brittle, the sky heavy. Even my own body reflected that transition; I was tired, melancholic, struggling with pain and inflammation. Still, the thought of that unfinished shoot kept following me like an open loop.

One morning, after weeks of grey skies and rain, the sun finally came out. It was only ten degrees outside, not exactly the kind of weather you’d want to undress in, but I decided to go anyway, before the farmers cleared the field. The light was changing every minute, the sun appearing and disappearing between clouds. I worked on manual settings, constantly adjusting, chasing the exposure.

In the middle of the shoot, the air-raid siren began to wail, a sharp echo cutting through the silence of the field. It wasn’t danger as much as a reminder that even simple creative moments now exist against a background of war. I took a few final frames and left the field.

Some sessions feel like flow, easy, intuitive, almost effortless. And there are others, like this one, that are full of resistance: the body hurts, the weather stings, nothing feels in sync. Yet these are often the most honest ones. Photography, for me, isn’t about capturing something beautiful. It’s about being present, with everything uncomfortable, imperfect, unresolved. That day in the cornfield wasn’t gentle, but it was real.