The Photographer Who Remembers Places by Feel, Not Frame

A Caravan Called Fast

The curtains were floral, the name painted on the side. Rápido, it said. Fast. Nuria Val was three years old, maybe four, travelling somewhere in Spain with her older siblings, the caravan swaying on summer roads. She remembers the pattern on those curtains more clearly than the destinations. That detail has stayed with her, decades later, as she prepares to open Vila Oliveta, a hotel and artists' residence in southern Catalonia, alongside her husband and their daughter Oli.

Val's relationship with travel began in that caravan, but it took shape elsewhere. At seventeen, modelling contracts took her out of Barcelona. She started photographing the cities where she worked, initially as record, then as instinct. The camera became a tool for noticing, then for understanding. Nature crept into the frame. Trips to Lanzarote, Iceland and Japan shaped her eye and, eventually, her business. In 2018, she co-founded Rowse with Gabriela Salord, a plant-based skincare line informed by landscape as much as formula.

Now she splits her time between hosting guests and planning the next departure. Norway recently. Peru next. Her cameras are always packed, sometimes alongside a single garment she hopes to photograph if the right backdrop appears. But she is trying, she says, to resist the reflex to document everything.

The Paradox of the Photographer

It is a strange admission for someone whose profession depends on seeing. Val remembers places not by how they looked, but by how they felt. The photographs, she explains, are her way of retrieving that feeling later. The image is not the experience; it is the map back to it.

This tension, between capturing and being present, runs through her work. She packs her camera as essential, yet lately finds herself trying to let moments stay unrecorded. It is not easy, she admits. The habit of framing is difficult to turn off. But the best pictures, she has learned, rarely happen on schedule. Her magic moments are always sunrise and sunset, the hours when light does something unrepeatable.

Logistics and Open Days

Val plans the logistics of a trip, then leaves the days themselves open. She travels early, preferring the first flight of the day because arriving with a full day ahead feels, in her words, like stealing one. She packs by rolling, though linen creases either way and she has made peace with it. She packs depending on how she feels at that moment, a mix of who she is and who she imagines becoming once she arrives.

The unnecessary item is always the same. There is one piece of clothing she has already pictured in a photograph, and she brings it hoping to find the right spot. Sometimes she does. Often she does not. But the possibility is worth the space in the suitcase.

The Essentials

When travelling back to back, Val keeps her routine minimal. Water, less coffee than she would like, and a walk on arrival to reset. Her skincare does not change from country to country. The same few products wherever she is, so her skin does not notice the shift. According to Val, planes dry everything out. She travels with Rowse All Day serum, which contains niacinamide, and Rowse Summer Mist, both designed to keep skin calm through long days and shifting climates.

Her go-to beauty hack is a single product for lips and cheeks, the Rowse Lip and Cheek Balm in Peach Blush, applied with her fingers in the back of a taxi. Efficiency and ritual compressed into one gesture.

The Landscape Arrives Slowly

Val prefers the window seat. Professional habit, she says. She looks at the light on the clouds and thinks about how she would expose it. But if given the choice between plane, train or car, she would marry the train, kiss the car and ghost the plane entirely. A sleeper train, she believes, is the only way to travel where the landscape arrives slowly enough to understand it.

This philosophy extends beyond transport. Journey over destination. The destination is usually what she is photographing. The journey is where magic and unexpected things happen. The unscheduled detour, the light at an odd hour, the conversation that shifts the day. She listens to Frank Ocean. She watches the world pass at a speed that allows comprehension.

From Modelling to Hosting

Modelling took Val abroad as a teenager, and she began capturing the places where she worked. That early interest in the natural world eventually led her into beauty. The trips that inspired Rowse were not research expeditions but personal journeys, places where she noticed how environment and wellbeing intersected. The volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, the geothermal springs of Iceland, the forest bathing culture of Japan.

Now she is preparing to host guests at Vila Oliveta, a project that inverts the direction of travel. Instead of moving through the world, she is creating a place for others to arrive. The residence will welcome artists, a space for making work in southern Catalonia. It is a different kind of documentation, perhaps. A way of holding space for others to experience their own magic moments.

What Stays

Val admits she is still learning how to be more present, to resist recording everything. What stays with her, she says, is not the image itself but the sensation it points toward. The floral curtains of the caravan. The quality of light through a train window. The feeling of arriving somewhere with a full day ahead, unplanned and open.

Photography, for Val, is not about preservation but retrieval. The pictures are not the thing itself. They are the feeling, archived. A way of remembering not what a place looked like, but what it felt like to be there, in that moment, before the camera came up.