Over the last 20 years, Hellen van Meene has produced a complex body of work, offering a contemporary take on photographic portraiture. Characterized by her exquisite use of light, formal elegance and palpable psychological tension, her depictions of girls and boys on the cusp of adulthood demonstrate a clear aesthetic lineage to seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Van Meene captures the intimacy in the photographer-subject relationship, bringing out a sense of honesty and vulnerability from within her models and highlighting the beauty of imperfection. She carefully poses her subjects in their environments to emphasize their fragility, adding a palpable tension to the photographs. At the same time, she captures them at deeper, more introspective moments--masterfully moving between the staged nature of the portraits and the real experiences of her subjects. The combination of van Meene's instinctive understanding of the universality of adolescent experience and the highly intimate collaboration between photographer and model makes for powerful portraits that resonate long after viewing. This book brings together more than 250 images, for the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date. Hellen van Meene (born 1972) studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is her fifth monograph, the others include Portraits (Aperture, 2004) Japan Series, New Work and Tout va disparaitre.

For the past seven years, Hellen van Meene has been producing intimate portraits of adolescents. Though the introspective gaze of her models suggest that these are spontaneous, private moments in the lives of her subjects, the carefully considered natural light, lush textures, and striking compositions betray van Meene's hand in choreographing each image down to the finest detail. Throughout, the picturesque qualities are undercut by a disquieting tension: the models' clothes are ill-fitting or inside-out; one girl is asked to lie in a cold bath, fully clothed; another models a fresh bruise. This intimate collaboration between the photographer and her models simultaneously exposes the uncertain nature of adolescent identities and the complicated act of capturing them on film. Hellen van Meene was educated at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She began exhibiting her work in 1994 and has had one-person exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, London, Milan, Tokyo, and at the Venice Biennale. In 2001 she was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize.

This photo book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Hellen van Meene New Work at Huis Marseille Amsterdam and Museum Folkwang Essen and contains portraits of adolescents and teenage mothers. The photographs were taken over a period of four years, particularly on travels to England, Latvia, Russia and Japan.

A collection of illustrations by artist Michael Gillete brings music and dogs together as a tribute to music legends as their four-legged counterparts.

For over thirty years, the New York Times Magazine has presented the myriad possibilities and applications of photography. Aperture is pleased to present the upcoming publication and exhibition The New York Times Magazine Photographs, which reflects upon and interrogates the very nature of both photography and print magazines at this pivotal moment in their history and evolution. Edited by Kathy Ryan, long-time photo editor of the magazine, and with a preface by former editorial director Gerald Marzorati, this volume presents some of the finest commissioned photographs worldwide in four sections: reportage, portraiture, style, and conceptual photography, including photo illustration. Diverse in content and sensibility, and consistent in virtuosity, the photographs are accompanied by reproduced tear sheets to allow for the examination of sequencing and the interplay between text and image, simultaneously presenting the work while illuminating its distillation to magazine form. This process is explored further through texts offering behind-the-scenes perspective and anecdotes by the many photographers, writers, editors, and other collaborators whose voices have been a part of the magazine over the years. David Campany contributes a critical essay that provides an in-depth history of the magazines relationship to photography, contextualizing its contributions within the larger world of magazine work. Also addressed are issues of documentary photography in relation to more conceptual photography; the efficacy of story-telling; and what makes an image evidentiary, objective, subjective, truthful, or a tool for advocacy; as well as thoughts on whether these matters are currently moot, or more critical than ever. As such, The New York Times Magazine Photographs aims to serve as a springboard for a rigorous, necessary, and revitalized examination of photography as presented within a modern journalistic context.

"As digital technologies continue to impact photography, there are those image-makers who rise above the fray to produce compelling work. Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century features 120 of the latest, greatest, and newly up-and-coming artists in a luscious compendium, each showcased in a four-page spread, with texts by sixteen top curators and theorists, and a glossary of important terms. More than a coffee-table book, Photo Art reads like an international art fair between covers."--Publisher's website.

This slightly oversized volume is composed of 55 powerful black-and-white portraits by the Dutch photographer Koos Breukel, all of internationally renowned photographers like Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Rineke Dijkstra--alongside a major work, in color or black-and-white, by each of the artists who were photographed. Thus Dennis Hopper's portrait is followed by a double-page spread of a biker couple, and Hellen van Meene's is preceded by a beautiful, adolescent redhead wearing a too-large camisole--looking over her shoulder and bathed in Vermeer-ish light. Made over the course of 15 years, this series collects all of Breukel's greatest heroes, who willingly sat for his 8 x 10 camera. Other featured artists include Ron Galella, Teun Hocks, Inez van Lamsweerde, Daido Moriyama, Arno Nollen, the Starn twins and a veritable who's who of Dutch twentieth-century photography.