Synopses & Reviews
Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene's new book invites you to enter her world. Tout va disparaître (French for "Everything will disappear", presents dreamlike portrait studies of really young people in their own individual surrounding environments. Photographed in the USA, Russia and the Netherlands, these young people in carefully planned poses, with muted light seem to be hovering between melancholy and an atmosphere of departure.
Synopsis
New Photographs, Hellen van meene's third book with Schrimer/Mosel, contains new portraits and, for the first time, interiors, still-lifes, and panorama shots. Van Meene's subjects are standing in front of miserable shacks on the peripheries of major American cities, on stairs cast in shadow, or next to gray-beige upholstered suited on unmade beds or posing awkwardly on car radiators. Their clothes range from jeans and a polo shirt, nightdresses and underwear, to glitter. Their gaze alternates between defiance and uncertainty - and they are young, some of them children. For more than a decade, Hellen van Meene, one of the most respected Dutch photographers, has given adolescence a "face" and a place. In carefully staged poses and subdued lightening, her models are shown in their familiar surroundings, yet also in the uncertain terrain of puberty, their physical and mental state floating somewhere between melancholy and a readiness to break out, self-abandonment and reinvention.