Elena Helfrecht is a visual artist born in 1992 and based in Bavaria, Germany. Her photographs start from autobiography and reach into the fantastic, the surreal and the uncanny. Horror and the abject are central to her work, as a way to approach questions that have no easy answers.
She studied art history and book science in Erlangen and photography at the Royal College of Art in London. Her project Plexus looks inward, at her family home and archive and at inherited trauma. Unternächte, published by Void in 2026, retells the winter folklore of the Twelve Nights that the women in her family passed down to her.
Her work has been shown at the South London Gallery, the Benaki Museum and Les Rencontres d’Arles. She won the BJP International Photography Award and the Camera Work Award, and was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award.
