Hellen van Meene
Hellen van Meene (Alkmaar, 1972) graduated in 1996 from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She quickly rose to international fame with her intimate portraits of young girls balancing on the threshold of adulthood. Van Meene is not concerned with capturing the identity or personality of her models. For that reason, she deliberately does not give her photos titles; no reference is needed to the identity of the people portrayed. Her photos are timeless portraits in which a dreamy, sometimes fairytale-like atmosphere predominates.
In her latest series Iluminaria - Vigil Flame, Van Meene explores a theme that is not unknown to her, namely revolt against patriarchalism. Van Meene's signature is unmistakably visible in this series, the great degree of timelessness and mystery of her images and her consistent use of natural light.
Simone Hoang
Simone Hoang studied Photography at the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam and at the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2017 she attended the Charles Nypels Lab at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
In her work she responds to reconstructs and redefines images and memories in order to take control of the intangible. Hoang sees memory as a mental faculty based on recollection and reconstruction processes, rather than a faithful reproduction of past events. By over processing the image, she eliminates the obvious thereby making space for imagination to come into play. Her way of working can be seen as research, where the process is as important as the end result itself.
Esmee Zeeventer
Esmee van Zeeventer (Rotterdam, 1997) graduated the bachelor of Fine Arts at the AKI Artez Enschede in 2021. She is now working as an artist using analog photography and exploring moving image. Esmee seems to operate as an investigator of her own universe, reflecting on her personal history, investigating and showing contemporary possibilities on everyday motives and matters while pondering on questions of the world. She extracts images from the world around her to visualize life’s eternal subjects as memories, love, fear and loneliness.
Morad Bouchakour
Award winning photographer Morad Bouchakour has the talent to produce high quality photographs with a playful twist. He travels frequently, yet his series cannot be classified as travel photography. Instead of exoticism, Bouchakour focuses on people: on the lives that they lead, on the mood they emanate and the stories they tell. He is not looking for an essential moment in a particular surrounding, but for an element with more depth, hidden behind the image.