I like to experiment a lot. When it comes to finding the right conditions for a photograph, then everything is possible. Sometimes you take big steps and sometimes very small ones.
Ever since its invention in the 19th century, photography has documented life. At the same time, it focuses on inviting audiences to a rather subjective world, while trying to be taken seriously as an art form. Photography has always been considered a male-dominated profession, but luckily things are changing. Scholars, writers, bloggers, photography students, and enthusiasts have been giving due to the female pioneers of the field. Most were always standing and/or hiding in the shadows, oblivious to how much they could acclaim and accomplish. Arguably, the techniques, concepts, and thematic female photographers use differ from those of male photographers. At a time when most women were convinced that their place was in the kitchen and certainly not in the dark room, some were struggling to surpass their male counterparts and work towards gaining respect and recognition for their work.
Hellen van Meene (Dutch photographer, 1972) started taking photographs at age 16 after her mother had given her a camera. Hellen would photograph her friends, which ultimately segued into the artist continuing to focus on adolescent girls in her professional photography to examine the construction of femininity in adolescence.
For her undergraduate degree, Van Meene studied Fine Arts at Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Five years out of art school, van Meene was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize (2001) and signed with New York's Matthew Marks Gallery. Much of her early work is focused on photographing young girls in old houses in her hometown of Alkmaar. The artist's portraits are more often of pubescent girls, clothed in softly coloured tops and dresses. Her subjects' clothing and gestures - as well as the location and lighting, are all planned by the artist, despite it seeming unclear how much of the scene is a candid moment of the subject's life captured by the photographer.
Some publications have noted the "innocently erotic" element that is present in these photographs. The sexuality present provokes discomfort in the viewer and raises the question of whether the models are aware of their sexuality and the effect it has on the viewer or whether they are unaware of the connotations of the way they have been positioned by the artist. As van Meene gained recognition for her work, she expanded her subject matter further.
Her collection The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a play on the speed at which rabbits reproduce and the idea that unhappy or uncomfortable moments are fleeting. This body of work was created from 1994-2015. From 1995-1998, she worked on a collection called Series Blanc which featured a girl in a transparent white lace dress, lacking undergarments. In 2004, she photographed a series of mothers and expecting women from Russia, the United Kingdom, and Latvia. In the 2007 series, Going My Own Way Home, van Meene photographed residents of an impoverished neighborhood in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, focusing more on the cultural and economic context of her subjects than in her previous works.
In 2005, the New York Times commissioned a portfolio of photographs of young Japanese women. Van Meene approached adolescent girls on the street in Tokyo and photographed them against nearby backdrops. In 2010, van Meene began photographing dogs alongside her adolescent subjects. Maintaining the same attention to detail and planning as in her earlier portraits. The photographer has stated that in this collection, she is less concerned with the sociological message in her work and more interested in curating "light, shape, posture, gaze and general mise-en-scene".
Van Meene's work was first exhibited in 1996 and has been shown around the world since then. Her photos are in the collection of many museums, including. Guggenheim NYC & MoMA. Throughout her 23-year career from 1994 to 2017, van Meene has had one-person exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, London, Milan, and Tokyo, and at the Venice Biennale and has exhibited at Sadie Coles HQ in London (2000, 2008), The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (2002), Folkwang Museum in Essen (2007), and Fotomuseum Winterthur (2008). Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions like the Biennale for Architecture in Venice (2000), Fotografen in Nederland een Anthologie at Gemeente Museum Den Haag (2002), In Sight: Contemporary Dutch Photography from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum at The Art Institute of Chicago (2005), Family Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), Paris Photo in Carrousel du Louvre in Paris (2008), Faces in the Nederlands Fotomusem in Rotterdam (2015) and at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, the Marc Foxx Gallery in LA, Le Case d'Arte in Milan, Galleria Laura Pecci in Milan, Galerie Paul Andiresse in Amsterdam and The Photographer's Gallery in London.
She lives and works in Heiloo and her subjects now include still lifes, dogs, and other animals. She is represented by galleries in London, New York and Tokyo. Hellen aims to produce a slowing down effect with her photographs, as she captures the moment between girlhood and womanhood, which is gone all too quickly. This timeless quality extends to the photographs themselves, which appear both contemporary and entirely from another era.
Photos don’t get better because they’re bigger.
We will continue talking about female names that left their mark on photography and about contemporary female photographers who are still to emerge. There are a lot of female photographers out there deserving of praise and we can only hope to cover as many of them as we can. Please follow this space to find out more.
