The young women in Hellen van Meene's extraordinary colour portraits are friends and acquaintances, people she has grown up with or encountered in her home town of Alkmaar in Holland. Children, pre-pubescents, teenagers and twenty-somethings: van Meene's subjects range in age.

Sometimes a girl is photographed over time, and we see her growing up in front of the camera. There are curious, underlying tensions in the portraits - between vulnerability and composure, awkwardness and grace, intimacy and detachment, naturalness and artifice. The scene of each picture is set very carefully by the artist, as she chooses location and clothing, make-up and mise en scene. These staged scenarios then contrast powerfully with the frank realism with which the girls are pictured.

Always washed in a natural light, no attempt is made to disguise the physical imperfections of young girls becoming young women. Neither the 'natural' children of the Romantic tradition, who were painted in moments of perpetual innocence, nor the imaginary, perfect bodies of fashion and advertising photography, van Meene's young subjects exist in a state of psychological and physical individuality. Their eyes often averted from the camera, they appear self-absorbed, yet complicit in the process of being photographed.

Though clearly contemporary portraits, many also conjure historical female archetypes, which accounts for their sometimes anachronistic, sometimes timeless, feel. A chubby girl in a bathtub, eyes downcast, lost in thought in a summer garden, could be Shakespeare's Ophelia by way of the pre-Raphaelite painter, Millais. A teenager adopts a contra posto pose for the camera, her raven tresses covering her nakedness like a young Godiva. A beatific, cropped-haired brunette in an orange flowered dress has the poise of a modern-day Jeanne d'Arc. Echoes of historical portraiture reverberate through the images - from Piero della Francesca to Breughel, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Vermeer - remaining skillfully implicit, rather than explicit.

Hellen van Meene was born in Alkmaar in 1972, where she continues to live and work. She studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her work was included in the group exhibition Scanning at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1996, and she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at De Vleeshal, Middelburg in 2000. She is the winner of the prestigious 1999 Charlotte Köhler Prize.

Curated by Kate Bush

Hellen van Meene has been financially supported by the Mondriaan Foundation Amsterdam, for the advancement of the visual arts, design and museums.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph co-published with De Vleeshal Middelburg and Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam. ISBN: 090787956X. Photographs from the exhibition are available for sale from Print Sales at The Photographers' Gallery.