Kate Bellm
“Now I know what freedom is, that’s why I cling onto it with all my strength”
Kate Bellm (London, 1987) has been a photographer since she picked up her very first camera at the age of twelve. She studied in Paris, grew up in Berlin, and has worked for brands such as Gucci, Adidas or Alexa Chung. In Sóller, where she lives surrounded by nature in its purest form, she has finally found her path to freedom.
text César Mateu Moyà
photography Kate Bellm
“I’m just a girl who loves nature, the sea and the mountains, and who lives for and through photography. In nature, I feel free because it gives me enough space to do everything I want to. Now, in Sóller, I can develop my creativity like never before, because here I can feel all the freedom in the world”.
To reach Kate Bellm’s home we travel along the road that connects Sóller and Deià, we go up and down and along dirt tracks until finally reaching her lovely house, which she and her husband Edgar reconstructed some years back. The light in this place is incredibly beautiful, even though a storm is gathering today.
“At this particular point in my life, I know I couldn’t live anywhere else. I would find an apartment in a big city very restrictive. Since I have lived in more populated cities, now I know what freedom is, and that’s why I cling onto it with all my strength”. A freedom that is not only important for her, but also for her five-year-old son Sage. “This is the best place for a child to grow up in. Here you can see what he’s interested in, the path he takes every day, how he interacts with his friends, his relationship with the sea, the fish. He is growing up without any pressure. Children are the future of the world; the universe depends on how we bring them up”.
Kate appreciates nature so much because she grew up in London “under pressure the whole time, pressure to finish school, to go to university – the atmosphere is very cold, there’s no sense of community because people are doing things all the time and nobody stops to look around. Even so, I think it was good for me, it made me the way I am now. Maybe if I had grown up in a more liberal place, I would want to live in a more enclosed town now,” she says.
Kate picked up a camera for the first time at the age of twelve. “I became a photographer at that moment, because it was already a natural part of me. Photography is my natural hide-out”. After training in London, she studied in Paris and some years later, she settled in Berlin, “the best big city to live in. It’s incredible, it’s full of young people, people with ideas, full of parks and lakes, it’s a fun city and at the same time it gives you a lot of freedom. I know that I became an artist in Berlin”, she says.
She has found her place, and her path, on Mallorca. She stopped working for fashion brands because she sells her photographs directly, photographs she creates because she feels she is flying. In September she will publish [...]
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