Kate Bellm is a photographer who portrays a carefree alternate universe
Deia, Spain is a picturesque, sprawling mountain village that looks more like a dream, but it is artist Kate Bellm’s reality. The photographer made the move a few years ago from Berlin—a bustling city best known for hard-partying and brutal architecture—to surround herself with the beauty she strives to document.
In her series Underwaterworld, Bellm plays an underwater voyeur who is welcomed by the ebbs and flows of the waters. Her images portray a surreal world where women live among the mysterious waves, without the constraints of clothing. They kiss and hold hands, seemingly without recognition of artist capturing them, while the explore the depths of what they have yet to discover. Thanks in part to the British native’s use of film photography, her subjects are transformed into whimsical beings from an alternate universe living in what appears to be pure bliss—an escape from the mayhem we’re all subject to on land. Light leaks into each frame but never stifles their freedom in the vast ocean together. While often seen as an annoying error in lomography, light leaks in Bellm’s are an asset. The bleeds of color only help to enhance the uninhibited tone that these women revel in during their adventures. Bellm explains it best when she muses that her love of film photography is not in spite of, but because of all the happy mistakes and unpredictability that can occur when developing her images. “That’s what makes it so fun,” she proclaims.
The women, of course, are not what they appear. They are not creatures from another planet, but models who she shares close ties with in her daily life—maybe who she scouted on the street that very same day—who are never posed. “My models are usually my friends and if they are not, they soon become friends after we shoot. I try to just have a great time with them and make the experience enjoyable for both sides,” she elaborates. “These photos come from a very natural place. It’s my life here and what we do every day. Being underwater is a major form of meditation for me so I really need to be in the ocean to just unwind.” So it just so happens that Bellm harnesses a superpower that transforms the sea stage—a playful swim between rocks, waves and the sun—into an alternate universe where nudity celebrates desire and pleasure in relation to nature.
In other projects like Girls and Skate, it becomes clear that the artist has a signature that transcends everything she touches. No matter the work, each visual presents a place where surrealism and nudity play together to forget sexual connotations and recall the playful aspects of human existence. In other projects, she also documents the lives of figures who lounge on rock faces, but on land and smoking cigarettes without regard for health or walking down unmarked paths without a map, or skating down open roads surrounded by sharp and plummeting cliffs.
When asked about what she wants her spectators to gain from her work, she responds, “I hope I share happiness and the feeling of freedom.” Ideally, Bellm hopes her viewers to feel like they are “floating in nature with nothing to care about.” She continues with calls for a connection nature when staring into the abyss of sunsets, grain in the contrast, and the curves of a feminine body.
The artist’s move to the Spanish countryside, to create art on her own terms, comes after years of more stringent, traditional training. It all began at age 12 when she picked up her first camera at school to photograph friends. Playing dress up and experimentation in the school’s dark room led to her professional background in fashion, which included studios walls and a lot more clothing for international publications like GQ and Vogue, as well as commercial work for luxurious brands such as Gucci, Adidas and Audi. It’s this background in fashion that proves that conveying such a lighthearted perspective in her current works doesn’t come effortlessly. Instead, her training helped guide her—to understand the natural light in any setting. And now, it is her unique way with photography that so many publications enlist her to deliver and that studios from Paris to Los Angeles ask her to exhibit. It is the antithesis of her longtime career back in Berlin, her own personal escape from societal standards of the art industry and beyond that truly produces her work. When I ask Bellm how she spends most of her days, she responds as you would expect—a clear mirror image of the photographs she creates: “Swimming in the ocean with my friends and baby, eating melon on the rocks, and taking photos of whoever I’m with.”
