Photographer Hellen van Meene

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.
In addition to an introductory essay by astrophysician and writer Jörg M. Colberg, the book is the first to include a selection of her interiors, still lifes and panoramic shots.Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene was herself barely out of girlhood when she began to photograph adolescent girls whom she knew, or found, in her home town of Alkmaar in the north of Holland. Invited to photograph in Japan in 2000, she found that while she could not communicate directly with her subjects, her instincts regarding the universality of adolescent experience, and her visual and stylistic approach to it, were translatable. In her square-format, medium-focal-length pictures of unnamed girls, van Meene strives to compose "photographs of adolescent situations and attitudes, which represent the type of 'normality' we don't usually share with others, but keep to ourselves."

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