Life, at times

“I was a person under a lot of pressure and I didn’t realise what was going on around me,” confesses Helena, with the incredulity and fascination of a person who has come back to life after having an NDE (near-death experience). 

Actually, the change of mindset in her life is related to the death of a loved one, her father. “Something happens to you then; you realise that death is real, you see it from very close quarters and you realise you have to enjoy what you do every day.” 

So that is how Helena suddenly started to see even rubbish as beautiful. “I have a series of drawings and patterns where I reflect rubbish as something beautiful. I don’t know what happened to me, I suddenly started to develop a psychological hyper-sensitivity towards everything around me.” 

The scene is clear. “I had left my job in the public administration and my father had just died. I was sitting on a park bench, a park I had never been to in my life. I suddenly found myself faced physically with silence, looking people in the eye, observing a pigeon kissing another pigeon. An impulse made me take my mobile phone out of my pocket. And then I started taking pictures.”

Every day since then Helena has uploaded a photograph onto her Instagram profile, under the name si-soy-helen. “Every day there is something that gives me goosebumps and I take a picture of it. Every day I take a photo and post it, and write what comes to me when I see it.” 

Before photography, it was charcoal drawings and writing poetry. “When I posted those first photographs that came about by accident on Instagram, I discovered that what I do, just as it is, without looking for quality, or definition, or professionalism, or sales or absolutely anything, connects up a bunch of people all over the world, and that behind those profiles there are people, not companies, or robots, or any economic goal or anything. And that is what makes me feel more complete, and helps me see the difference of looking at the world around us, as part of my transformation.” 

Helena gives her reason for defending Instagram “as a great social network regardless of posing, influencers and that whole market which doesn’t interest me at all. I am talking about how it has connected me to people who have the same hobbies as me, who place the same value on life through photography, and I will always thank the creation of this network for that.”

Sometimes the best images come when she is bored at home; “they’re usually the most artistic ones, that’s where I experiment,” she says. “I believe that the photos find me, I see them every day, but I don’t look for them.” Her husband encourages her to study a little so as to be able to start selling them, “but I’m not a photographer, and I don’t set out to be one, I have no idea of the professionalism of a photographer, or quality, or light or any knowledge of all these things. The only thing I know is that the sun gives a different life, and that light gives us life.”

Regarding the success with which her photos have met, Helena says “I never expected it, and it wasn’t my intention, either. My aim was more to do with the quote by Nietzsche: We have art lest we perish from the truth.”

Although she isn’t entirely sure about the whole thing, a gallery in Paris contacted her last year to take part in a group exhibition with artists from all over Europe. The success of this exhibition led her to repeat the experience, in Warsaw this time. She also plans to exhibit in Madrid. 

“Yes, thinking about it, I think I will give it a try.”