Helena Batlle

Barcelona, 1971

When she was a little girl, Helena liked to discover stories in the images taken by other people. When she completed her studies at the Escola Municipal d’Arts Visuals (EMAV), she began to look for her “own” stories, which basically continue to be the lives of others. From medical photography she went on to capture scenes of Barcelona in which music was the guiding thread of the narrative. The series Jazz a cuestas formed part of the traveling exhibition Jazz x Jazz. El so de la imatge (1998), consisting of photos of several editions of the Ciutat Vella jazz festival.

In 2000 she began to work as a photographer for an international consultancy firm, where little by little she learned other ways of communicating through new technologies. She currently works freelance in this area, discovering the possibilities of her mobile phone without abandoning her traditional camera.

At the same time she has collaborated with numerous NGOs: Avocats sans frontières, the Foyer de l’Espérance (Cameroon), Lliçà Peruanitos, the Fundación Efraín Recinos (Guatemala), Homelessfonts (Catalonia), and currently the Asociación Española contra el Cáncer (also in Catalonia). In this work she has discovered other ways of orienting communication: the challenge of reaching out to people and institutions and connecting them so that they can collaborate disinterestedly to their mutual benefit.

She is currently combining her photography projects with teaching, and dividing her time between Barcelona, Girona, and Madrid. Though the stories that come out of photographs can always lead elsewhere, and farther away. Her most recent project is Barnatropia, the vision of a Barcelona that cannot be found on any map, captured with the camera of her mobile phone.