Hellen van Meene

Over the last 20 years, Hellen van Meene has produced a complex body of work, offering a contemporary take on photographic portraiture. Characterized by her exquisite use of light, formal elegance and palpable psychological tension, her depictions of girls and boys on the cusp of adulthood demonstrate a clear aesthetic lineage to seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Van Meene captures the intimacy in the photographer–subject relationship, bringing out a sense of honesty and vulnerability from within her models and highlighting the beauty of imperfection. She carefully poses her subjects in their environments to emphasize their fragility, adding a palpable tension to the photographs. At the same time, she captures them at deeper, more introspective moments—masterfully moving between the staged nature of the portraits and the real experiences of her subjects. The combination of van Meene's instinctive understanding of the universality of adolescent experience and the highly intimate collaboration between photographer and model makes for powerful portraits that resonate long after viewing. This book brings together more than 250 images, for the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date.
Hellen van Meene (born 1972) studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is her fifth monograph, the others include Portraits (Aperture, 2004) Japan Series, New Work and Tout va disparaître.

For the past seven years, Hellen van Meene has been producing intimate portraits of adolescents. Though the introspective gaze of her models suggest that these are spontaneous, private moments in the lives of her subjects, the carefully considered natural light, lush textures, and striking compositions betray van Meene's hand in choreographing each image down to the finest detail. Throughout, the picturesque qualities are undercut by a disquieting tension: the models' clothes are ill-fitting or inside-out; one girl is asked to lie in a cold bath, fully clothed; another models a fresh bruise. This intimate collaboration between the photographer and her models simultaneously exposes the uncertain nature of adolescent identities and the complicated act of capturing them on film. Hellen van Meene was educated at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She began exhibiting her work in 1994 and has had one-person exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, London, Milan, Tokyo, and at the Venice Biennale. In 2001 she was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize.

Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene was herself barely out of girlhood when she began to photograph adolescent girls whom she knew, or found, in her home town of Alkmaar in the north of Holland. Invited to photograph in Japan in 2000, she found that while she could not communicate directly with her subjects, her instincts regarding the universality of adolescent experience, and her visual and stylistic approach to it, were translatable. In her square-format, medium-focal-length pictures of unnamed girls, van Meene strives to compose "photographs of adolescent situations and attitudes, which represent the type of 'normality' we don't usually share with others, but keep to ourselves."