Iness Rychlik is a Polish-born, UK-based photographer and filmmaker whose self-portraits use her own body, marked by a chronic hypersensitive skin condition, as a canvas for exploring pain, solitude and vulnerability. Her images, set in a Victorian-inflected aesthetic of corsets, pins and antique fabric, “provoke the viewer's imagination, rather than satisfy it”.
She graduated with First Class Honours in Film from Screen Academy Scotland. Her final-year film The Dark Box, set in Victorian London, premiered at Camerimage and earned her a Golden Tadpole nomination for cinematography. She also shot and directed two mini-documentaries about art for BBC Scotland. By 2025 she had been photographing self-portraits for seven years, a practice she has described as “my sacred and happy place”. In early 2021 a SuperRare curator invited her onto the platform after following her work on Instagram. She was drawn to NFTs by the ability to preserve her work digitally, after years of frustration with uncredited use and censorship of her photography on mainstream web platforms. She has said she keeps a regular job so that her art is never tied to her financial stability, which she calls “my great unconditional love”.
