IN Hellen van Meene’s recent portraits of teenage mothers, commissioned by the Pump House Gallery, the adolescent dreamers that populated her earlier images are re-imagined through the transformations of motherhood. The idea for the series was formulated when a number of van Meene’s earlier models became pregnant, interesting the artist in the situation of these young women entering motherhood at a time when they themselves had barely passed through childhood. Although the parameters of this project appear to be those of social documentary – the young mothers were contacted through various agencies in Lambeth, with many portraits shot in short, impromptu photographic sessions – the resulting images are elaborate, painterly and often very beautiful. The portraits show a range of young women in poses that recall states of reverie and inner contemplation, with van Meene’s attention to detail of pose, costume and setting providing visual resonances within and between images in the series.
Van Meene has always said her work is not concerned with social or psychological portraiture, but it is hard not to read narratives around the individual characters or attempt to decipher clues in the images. As in her earlier work with girls from her hometown in the Netherlands, the focus of these images is on moments that appear to solidify the fantasies and tensions considered characteristic of adolescence – an awkwardness in the body, a fetishistic attention to clothes, hair and make-up, an inaccessible interior life. In one image a girl stands in front of what appears to be a shed door, framed on one side by a tangle of garden implements. Her body is placed at an angle to the camera, as if she is about to enter the shed, but her face is turned upwards, her eyes closed, as if she has been caught in a state of rapture. These staged, stilled moments recur across the series. A number of the models are photographed with their eyes shut, so that the theme of pregnancy and motherhood appears to be a metaphor for the gestation of imaginative possibilities too. In van Meene’s earlier photographs her models’ poses often suggested melancholia or lifelessness. In this new series the subjects seem to be full of dreams, rather than drained of them. Images of reverie contrast with the more straightforward portraits of mothers and babies, often photographed so as to emphasise the bodily transformations that have taken place, and the protective bond between mother and child. In one image the girl’s pink tracksuit top is zipped up around herself and her child, hiding the baby from view and revealing the stretch marks on her stomach. Her wary gaze towards the camera is softened by the repetition of pink across the image – from the flesh of the mother and baby, to the tracksuit, to the blossoms in the tree above.
The London portraits are exhibited alongside recent series made in Russia and Tokyo, as well as van Meene’s native Netherlands. Over the last couple of years van Meene has moved away from an initial pool of models from her hometown to explore the dynamics of short photographic sessions with young women and men she meets on the streets of the cities she visits. Talking about this new work, van Meene explains how the speed of the encounter in a foreign place appeals to her, as she scouts each day for models, working for only 10 or 15 minutes on an individual portrait. The recent Tokyo series came out of a commission by the New York Times Magazine, and provides a bridge between her earlier work and the London images. The adolescent subjects perform in scenes that often feel slightly surreal, with van Meene working with clothing and hair to create strange, even absurd, dialogues with their surroundings. Details such as lengths of hair pulled through shoulder straps or the framing of a tightly fitting hood continue van Meene’s interest in her models as actors, sometimes appearing more as objects within her symbolic, subtle dramas. Other images use the recurring motif of the model surrounded by foliage, with their costume, hair and flowers appearing to have a life of their own, adopting the iconography of a Pre-Raphaelite painting in which the model and setting are re-imagined through mythologies of goddesses, femme fatales and martyrs.
Susie Gray, the curator of the Pump House exhibition, explains that the decision to exhibit the London portraits alongside work from other countries was to emphasise the ongoing nature of van Meene’s project, and the difference in her approach to that of traditional documentary. Van Meene herself says that the illusion of a documentary project is broken when works from different contexts are seen together, with visual repetitions and differences provoking readings of individual portraits, rather than a classificatory project of ‘Japanese teens’ or ‘London young mothers’. Looking through the images that van Meene has made over the last couple of years, it appears that the short, intense encounter has provided a way for her to represent a broader cultural range within her work, linking the far-off gazes of south London mothers to those of trendy Tokyo girls. It seems fitting, then, that she will be exhibiting simultaneously in London and Tokyo, with the title of her exhibition in Tokyo seeming to sum up her approach: ‘A Sense of You, Created by Me’. While the ‘You’ of van Meene’s photographs is constantly changing, it is the continuing, strongly felt presence of the artist that connects all the images, so that they are ‘van Meenes’ before they are portraits of individual identities, in the same way that Warhol’s portraits are primarily ‘Warhols’ before they are pictures of Liz Taylor or an anonymous client. This is what continues to make van Meene’s work fascinating and difficult to classify: the balance between the genres of photography that attempt to tell a story about the subject depicted – documentary or studio portraiture – and the continuing acknowledgment of the artist’s role in creating these stories, captured in these new photographs by a series of small details, from an upturned face, to a baby held to the body, to the colour of a flower blossom. Through these short encounters van Meene creates a symbolic universe in which changing lives and bodies become as weighted as traditional depictions of women as virtues or vices, transforming a south London mother into an allegory that the viewer is left to translate.
catherine grant is a writer based in london
THE PUMP HOUSE GALLERY TOURING EXHIBITION TRAVELS TO OPEN EYE GALLERY,
LIVERPOOL, 21 JULY - 2 SEPT 2006 AND FOCAL POINT GALLERY, SOUTHEND-ON-SEA,
16 DEC 2006 - 3 FEB 2007.