Portraits (Aperture Foundation by Hellen van Meene Reviewed by José M. Gonzalez Article rating: 5.95

A portrait is a window into the essence of its subject. The whole point of a portrait is to capture an individual and visually represent who they are. Why then, is Hellen van Meene’s book Portraits, by definition, not a book of portraits? Van Meene takes her own fictional characters and uses models to portray these characters, who she photographs as a portrait of that character. This is why all of van Meene’s photographs are untitled.

Her models are not the subjects of her pieces, the characters they portray are. She chooses models that purposely lack expression in order to mold them when taking her photographs. That is the reason why she uses such young models. An old wrinkled woman would be too interesting to photograph, and physically would not let van Meene’s characters come out. Van Meene calls her models “material” for the photograph.

This lack of visually interesting models doesn’t curtail the extreme psychological intensity, or poignancy, of her work. Van Meene’s goal is to visually express a feeling, a mood, and an internal sense of space from the outside. She uses her models as she would a piece of fabric strewn across a bed, as one piece of a whole. This is like her use of floral prints to represent femininity and a blooming happening in a girl to woman’s life.

Her themes revolve around youth, specifically pubescent girlhood, and the feelings that undergo that change in a girl character’s life. Her models are all young girls, though recently she has been working with young boys. Interestingly even the boys seem to have an androgynous quality to them.

Though van Meene’s work is extremely gender based in theme and content, and can be viewed as almost erotic; it is less about eroticism than it is about documenting and expressing a point in a young character’s life.

Van Meene doesn’t attempt to give social or emotional commentary on the lives of adolescence at large, just as far as her characters are concerned. And though eroticism is definitely part of her play, eroticism alone lacks the layered depth that van Meene is portraying in her work.

Egoism, solitude, quite contemplation, growth, fading innocence, inner tension and turmoil with a sometimes tranquil exterior all encompass her images. In many of her photographs the onlooker sees beauty, but something is wrong. Van Meene invites us to look at what is wrong, and attempt to figure it out.

Another major theme in her work is ‘being stuck’, or the inability to move. This also is a part of a change that happens in young people, which she uses frequently with her characters. She represents this through metaphor, having a jogger’s running suit wrapped around a tree, a girl’s head stuck in waste paper basket, a girl inside of a boy’s shirt, unable to move, or hair tangled in branches.

Portraits is an interesting book, in that the 55 color images of fiction envelopes the viewer without a lot of essays or opinions on the art to hinder the purity of the experience. The only essay, which appears at the end of the book, is well written by Kate Bush and gives another perspective on van Meene’s work.

>>Click here to purchase Portraits by Hellen van Meene from Aperture Foundation...