27 Juy - 02 September 2000
Like many contemporary photographers, van Meene is fascinated by Vermeer. She loves the reverberating mystery of his women, motionless in their tableaux of angled silver light. One of her photographs reprises 'Girl With a Pearl Earring', reversing the pose and updating the garments. The girl's sheeny hair swathes her brow and shoulders like the headdress in the painting. But her expression suggests profound melancholy, as if she knew that her face didn't fit Vermeer any more than the matronly clothes ill-suited to her gawky physique.
Van Meene is Dutch. Her adolescent subjects are not the dime-a-dozen Lolitas of American photography but genetic descendants of the girls in northern European art.