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Portfolio in The New York Times Magazine

2005-04-03, The New York Times Magazine

The Sunday April 3rd, 2005 edition of The New York Times Magazine features a seven page portfolio of photos Hellen van Meene made on assignment for the magazine in Japan in February/March of this year.

You can view a slideshow of the portfolio here. The online article is now in the Article Archive, but there's a mirror here (PDF, 281KB).

Two quotes from the article:

"Hellen van Meene is one of a handful of Dutch photographers who are currently enjoying something of an international vogue for their portrait work. From the glamorous and theatrical celebrity photographs of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin [...] to the stark, intently observed subjects of Rineke Dijkstra's pictures [...], there is no single Dutch style; there is only a shared taste for original portraiture. Van Meene, for her part, has developed a characteristically small, square and intimately composed portrait shot -- most often of pubescent girls, soft and languorous and at times, she observes, innocently erotic."
"In February and March of this year, van Meene approached girls and young women on the street in Tokyo and shot them in casual 10-minute sessions against the backdrops at hand. Van Meene says she does not conceive of her portrait photographs in the traditional documentary way: while she does not exactly ''stage'' her subjects, neither does she try to capture their true, underlying personality or state of mind. Instead, she chooses to see her subjects as the raw material of her own fictions. ''This is not just you, now,'' she explains. ''This is a sense of you, created by me.''"