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처음에 블로그에서 봤을때도 범상치 않더니, 마침 zoom 에 실린 사진가.
네델란드 회화와 유사한 면이 있다 했는데... 독일인이었단. 어떤 강박/페티쉬에 대한 언설같다는 느낌.
웹상이라 머라 할 순없겠지만, 정말 색상하나는 엄청나게 뛰어나다. 여기서 색상은 정확하게 사진과 부합되는, 도구로서 말하는 것. 저 컬러가 모두 작가 스스로 뽑아낸 제품이라면, 절대 디지털 작업으로 이뤄낼 순 없을 듯하다. 물론 아직은.
다시 한번 네거티브의 유려함에 녹아내리는 토요일.
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出: zoom-net.com
Small images, printed opaquely on aluminum and laid out in preciselyordered series. Images that seem to be a repeated whisper, discreetly inviting the viewer to enter into the secret and intimate world of adolescents and hearkening back to age-old stories and situations. A chubby teen with the beauty of a Dutch farm girl, intimately runs her fingers through her long wavy hair until it becomes a sort of protective, consolatory veil. Another girl, lost in thought, stretches out her hand under the tap, leading us to imagine something mysterious has just taken place.
The creator of these photographs, Hellen Van Meene (born in 1972 in Alkmaar, The Netherlands), began showing her portraits of adolescent girls in 1996, immediately after having completed her studies at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and, still very young, in 1999 won the prestigious Charlotte Kohker Prize. Following this wide-ranging study of Dutch adolescents, she created a new series on Japanese girls (shown in 2000 at the Venice Biennial of Architecture and in 2002 at the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago).
Recently she has also begun doing portraits of young boys, but with a difference. While almost all the photos of adolescent girls were taken within the walls of the home, here they are almost all taken out-of-doors, as if to say that for males, identity formation occurs in confrontation with the outside world.
Many critics have underscored the fact that Hellen Van Meene's work draws on the tradition of the Flemish School with its cold precision and descriptive powers that avoid any type of sentimental emotional involvement. However, even if this is true, it should be added that this precision does not lead Van Meene to transform her images into portraits that freeze and flatten the identities of those she is photographing. Quite the contrary. Her photographs are not at all unambiguous and seem disturbed by a sort of void, a subtle chink that insinuates itself into the coherency of what is being said and by an oscillation in meaning that emerges in every image.
Her very choice of subject-adolescents-contributes to emphasizing this state of suspension that is somewhat ambiguous and fleeting and which seems to form the basis of her photos. In fact, adolescence is a time of life in which young men and women find themselves poised between childhood and adulthood. They are no longer children, but neither have they attained the identity and status of adults. Vulnerable to swings in mood and even depression, on the outside they often seem very sure of themselves, but deep within themselves they hide a sense of fragility. Their bodies are in the process of developing and in full metamorphosis as evidenced by the skin blemishes and chubbiness that will most likely disappear before long.
Van Meene's work captures these adolescents at that precise instant in which both a sense of natural ease and awkwardness, childish fragility and signs of maturity, sensuality and innocence, grace and ungainliness appear simultaneously. In some ways, her work is similar to the "Beaches" series of her co-national Rineke Dijkstra in which young adolescents in bathing suits standing at the shoreline, look right into the camera lens that is ready to capture them the very moment their vulnerability and sense of embarrassment appear, somewhat tense in a pose that should represent who they are but actually does just the opposite by bringing out the impossibility of reconciling themselves with themselves. While Rineke Dijkstra obtains a similar result by calmly waiting for that instant in which the faces and postures of those whose portraits she is taking betray that interweaving of strength, vulnerability, tension and emotion, Van Meene prefers to carefully construct her images. She chooses the clothes the young people will wear, the place and way in which they will pose and their make-up and hairstyles.
Clearly staged, yet unlike those used for fashion photos, she does not concentrate on the beauty and seductiveness of these "girls in bloom" (it is no accident that Van Meene prefers adolescents with a "girl next door" look, never outright beauties), but rather strives to reveal their uncomfortable relationship with their developing bodies which seem to fascinate and disturb them at the same time. Bodies that become both a mirror of their fragility and emotional uncertainty, quite removed from the image of a false sense of security adolescents usually put on for adults.
Ayoung girl modestly hides her small nude breasts behind a blouse. Another, in a bra and panties, thoughtfully rests her head on the balcony railing at home. Yet another looks at her face reflected in a water-filled vase as if looking for the truth of her own image, the secret to her identity. What thoughts and emotions seethe within these young girls? In the not-at-allobliging view of Hellen Van Meene, one notes an entomologist's approach, but at the same time a slight sense of empathy, a delicate pietas.
On the surface of their makeup-less, vulnerable skin marked with blemishes and red blotches and sometimes stripped of the clothes that normally help young people construct their own identity, what Van Meene has emerge is the fragility and unease of their emotional states. "I want to create photographs of adolescent situations and behavior characterized by that sense of 'normality' that is usually not shared with others, but only ourselves. The normality that I strive to capture is a personal intimacy that contemporary society prefers not to speak of and to hide. Often the honesty of a spontaneous, private gesture is disconcerting and is frequently condemned"(1) she says.
But this sort of "normality", loaded as it is with truth, intimacy, sensuality and modesty, is destabilizing in a world of glossy images that often play with clich? of angelic beauty or the exhibition of perfect bodies that have been cleansed of all imperfection and emotion, rendered "transparent" and super-visible from all aspects, but which at the same time are empty, false and lacking in mystery.
Van Meene's images, on the other hand, seem to feed on secrets. Secrets of bodies unknown to themselves, of hidden anxieties that would seem part of stories frozen in time. Alover of John Everet Millais' painting Ofelia and influenced by the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, Hellen Van Meene uses poses and framings adapted from these artists, not to show romantic and evanescent beauty, but to fill her photos with asphyxiating silences and uneasiness in order to evoke mysterious stories that the viewer is invited to pursue with his or her own imagination. A young boy lying on his back in the snow covers with his hands an eye from which a drop of blood has fallen that stains the pure-white snow. What has happened? What is this young man doing? We have no way of knowing. And yet it is as if this disturbing image (like the others by this photographer) has the power to reawaken our own personal memories, to push us back into those memories tied to the adolescence each of us experienced. Amechanism of emotional recollection that Van Meene's works call up thanks to their conscious openness and indeterminateness.
In fact, despite the fact that her images are real portraits, the accompanying title never includes the name of the young person photographed. What's more, the settings themselves, whether interior or exterior, are framed to avoid any type of precise reference. Van Meene is not at all interested in portraying the real-life situation of a given adolescent or in taking portraits that reveal their hidden inner identities.
What she aims to do is transform her images into a sort of footprint, an echo capable of bringing to life once again the traces and shadows of our own adolescence, traces often denied, shadows easily forgotten and yet ones that remain forever in the memory of each and every one of us.
1) Interview with Hellen Van Meene by Paola No?in Tema Celeste, March-April 2001.
By Gigliola Foschi
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