If you’re online, you’ve seen Kate Bellm’s photography whether you know it or not. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say she single-handedly defined the golden hour aesthetic — sun-warmed skin, salty air, plumerias sweating in the heat, the feeling of a long summer day that spills over into night, bikini still wet from an afternoon at the beach. There's a particular quality to Kate Bellm's photography that's hard to name but impossible to miss. Her images make abandoning your obligations for a remote Mediterranean island feel like the only sensible option. Clothing is always optional.

But it wasn’t always that way. Bellm grew up in England, studied in Paris, lived in Berlin. She shot the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace at 16, then turned around and photographed Harley biker gangs in South Carolina for Esquire. She’s shot for British Vogue, Gucci, 032c and has worked with almost every brand that’s helped define the last two decades of cool. And yet the work she's most known for — intimate images of friends living freely on a Spanish island — came later, after she moved to a mountainside town in Mallorca and created an entirely new reality.

Bellm learned to shoot on her father's Canon A-1 SLR and process film in her school’s darkroom. “The moment I picked up a camera it was love at first touch,” she says. “I started shooting my next-door neighbor, and I can remember so clearly the feeling of obsession with this craft. I haven’t stopped ever since.” She was later mentored by her friend’s father, David Montgomery, a photographer known for his portraits of world leaders and celebrities. An interesting contrast to the free-spirited work she's known for now, but the leap, in retrospect, feels inevitable. Bellm has always been more interested in living than observing.

It's true: Her subjects road trip, free-dive, run naked across the Balearic cliffs. The resulting images — collected in her books Amor and La Isla, and most recently La Selva — feel less like documentation and more like a collection of memories. La Isla, born out of the pandemic when Bellm found herself confined to the island, became a love letter to a place she was still learning to call home. "I fell truly in love with the island shooting La Isla,” she says. “Even a trip to the grocery store became inspirational. I had my camera ready to shoot for any moment that arose — a random cloud or ray of sun. I explored every inch of the island for that project.” The book was described by its publisher as "a nostalgia for somewhere you have never been." That's Bellm's particular gift: she makes you homesick for a life that isn't yours.

In 2023, she extended that vision into Hotel Corazon — a 15-room property in a historic finca nestled between the Tramuntana mountains and the Mediterranean, built alongside her husband, artist Edgar Lopez. The vision was always to create a space rooted in community. "We host so many artists," she says. "We always have shoots going on, and are creating dinners and events from fashion brands across the globe. It's been so fun to bring the fashion community I work with around the world to Hotel Corazon."

It has, she says, reached exactly the point she imagined and hoped for. Which sounds about right for someone who has spent her career trusting her instincts — about a place, a frame, a feeling. Kate Bellm doesn't overthink it. She just shoots.

Related Articles