Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene, accompanied by her husband Frank, is visiting Japan for the fifth time. Sipping on an orange juice inside the smoked glass walls of Montauk cafe on Omotesando's busy shopping strip, she tells how the Japan Foundation invited her to contribute to the nation's pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, which was titled "City of Girls." That led to her first trip to Tokyo in 2000 and a series of snaps of melancholic young women, which later led to a similar commission from the New York Times in spring 2005.
Van Meene's portraits of vulnerable, "lost" adolescent females seem to have struck a chord here in Japan, where a selection of her work is currently on show at the Gallery Koyanagi in Ginza (till April 20) and Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya (till April 12). Perhaps the principal attraction of her work for Tokyoites is the shock value of the fact that her subjects are so atypical of the looks that residents of the city associate with teenage girls. Van Meene clearly has an eye for outsiders.
"I'd choose her," she says, pointing to the plain-looking waitress who delivered our drinks. "If she was walking down the street you wouldn't notice her -- of course it's random, but I like to pick girls who don't stand out."
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