Helena Christensen

Helena Christensen never wanted to just pose. She was born in Copenhagen in 1968, the daughter of a Danish father and a Peruvian mother, and before turning twenty she was already walking the runways in Paris. Yet her true obsession was always on the other side of the camera lens.

In 1990, director Herb Ritts placed her on a Hawaiian beach to shoot the music video for Wicked Game alongside Chris Isaak. The result was a black-and-white piece with cinematic grain that transformed the audiovisual codes of the era and put her at the forefront of the global industry overnight.

That footage set the visual standard for an entire decade.

During the 1990s she was part of the select group the American press dubbed the supermodels of the runway. She signed million-dollar contracts with houses such as Chanel, Versace and Revlon, but she used every work session to learn lighting techniques from masters like Peter Lindbergh and Irving Penn.

Switching sides and the editorial adventure

In 1994, Robert Altman cast her in the ensemble of Prêt-à-Porter, a film that satirized the fashion industry without holding back. Her experience in front of the movie camera confirmed her suspicions: creative control wasn't in front of the lights, but behind the viewfinder.

That is why, in 1999, she co-founded the magazine Nylon with Marvin Scott Jarrett, serving as creative director. She wanted a publication with a raw aesthetic and imperfect typography that would break away from the artifice of the traditional magazines of the era.

The editorial move paid off for years.

Christensen began shooting full editorial spreads for magazines such as Elle, Marie Claire and Vogue. She used 35 mm analog film and medium-format cameras, rejecting the aggressive digital retouching that was becoming standard in commercial studios at the start of the century.

Nordic Fiction and Documentary Photojournalism

In 2005, Danish director Christoffer Boe offered her the lead role in Allegro. The science fiction film explored memory loss in a sealed-off Copenhagen, and Christensen shot alongside Ulrich Thomsen under the strict framework of European auteur cinema.

And she never went looking for similar roles again.

She preferred to focus her work on social and documentary photojournalism. Starting in 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) brought her on field missions in Colombia, Ukraine and Rwanda to document the impact of forced displacement.

In 2020, she presented her photo series on climate change in the glaciers of Peru, closing a personal circle with the land of her maternal family. The exhibition was mounted with large-format prints without digital retouching, at a installation cost of 45,000 euros for its first stop in New York.