De Zeven Werken van Barmhartigheid / bezoek de zieken, 2019

Hellen Van Meene is a Dutch photographer known for her portraits of girls she meets on the street. She looks for subjects who "are said to have imperfect faces and flawed bodies." With her portraits Hellen Van Meene brings out the ingrained grace of her subjects with their changing faces and bodies. Many of the girls she has photographed are from Hellen Van Meene’s home town with the details of older homes in the background. Hellen Van Meene over the years has turned her interests to animals and also fashion photography. She has been featured in TIME and on CNN and is also a much sought after workshop leader. She was commissioned by Pump House to do a series on teenage mothers and by the New York Times to travel to Japan and photograph Japanese girls. Hellen Van Meene’s photographs strive to compose adolescent situations and emotions. The portraits contain a ""normality"" we do not usually share with others. Her work is completed with mutual trust and a shared curiosity of the artist and her subject. She poses her subjects in their appearance to sometimes include their hair caught up in a tree or dampened slightly or perhaps to have on a transparent blouse. Hellen's models are not great beauties in the classic sense, but appear to grow into one as their sexuality is awakened with her poses. In 2010 Hellen Van Meene began to unexpectedly photograph dogs. It began with her wanting to take pictures of her daughter with a large white rabbit and from there to using other animals in other photos. She tried using roosters and goats first but found them hard to manage while photographing and finally decided on dogs as for most people they consider their dog to be part of the family. She did not want to give up on the portraits she loved creating, so decided to combine the two together into girls with dogs. Hellen Van Meene’s latest photographs employ familiar motifs from art history and portray specific moods and atmosphere. It is hard to tell if these recent creations are from 50 years ago or yesterday. (Artist website)