Hellen van Meene

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Through October 20

One would assume that there is little elbowroom left for photographs dealing with contemporary adolescence, a theme that artists from Rineke Dijkstra to Justine Kurland cover at length in their respective idioms. Hellen van Meene’s unsettling portraits of pubescent girls have nonetheless found solid ground of their own.

Her subjects are often strangers encountered in the street and photographed only once, or else girls with whom she establishes a mutual “respect and curiosity,” resulting in a number of portraits executed intermittently over a period of months or years.

Until recently, there was a palpable Northern European look to her images; the washed out colors, the cool natural light, and the wan complexion of her subjects were all consistent with the pictorial traditions of her native Netherlands. In this recent work, bringing together thirty-one photographs simply subtitled Japan, the artist is seen searching further afield, while remaining firmly focused on the psychological and physical metamorphoses of female adolescence.

Van Meene’s portraits are numbered, not titled—suggesting an appropriately non-linguistic understanding of the instinctive terrain of preteens. Freed from the responsibility of documenting particular individuals, her photographs survey the multiple permutations of imperfect beauty and vulnerable strength characterizing the no-man’s-land between childhood and maturity.

The artist also discreetly intervenes in the appearance, pose, and setting of her subjects (reversing a blouse on one girl, intertwining another’s hair amongst tree branches), further distancing her work from strictly biographical portraiture. Both fact and fiction, her images describe the artist as much as they do her willing young subjects. We will never know, for example, if the two young girls sharing a red plastic rain poncho are meant as homage to Diane Arbus’ famous shot of identical twin sisters, or are simply captured as the artist found them.

Adding to the cinematic ambiguity of her project is its unmethodical seriality: some girls continue to reappear under similar yet subtly modified circumstances, as if auditioning for parts as alternate versions of themselves. Van Meene’s slippery photographs—coy, candid, staged, and formal—are oddly comforting in their affirmation of the universality of transformation, and the fluidity of identity.




James Trainor