Tout Va Disparaitre

Hellen van Meene's third book with Schirmer/Mosel contains new portraits and, for the first time, interiors, still-lifes, and panorama shots. Van Meene's subjects are standing in front of miserable shacks on the peripheries of major American cities, on stairs cast in shadow, or next to gray-beige upholstered suits in rural-looking houses in Eastern Europe, sitting on unmade beds or posing awkwardly on car radiators.

Their clothes range from jeans and polo shirts, nightdresses and underwear, to glitter. Their gaze alternates between defiance and uncertainty - and they are young, some of them children. For more than a decade, Hellen van Meene, one of the most respected Dutch photographers, has given adolescence a 'face' and a place. In a carefully staged poses and subdued lighting, her models are shown in their familiar surroundings, yet also in the uncertain terrain of puberty, their physical and mental state floating somewhere between melancholy and a readiness to break out, self-abandonment and reinvention.