With a quote from the poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" by W. H. Auden, a metaphor for the passage of time, Hellen van Meene (born 1972) has titled her latest monograph, which is published on the occasion of a major retrospective of her work at the Fotomuseum Den Haag. For about two decades, the Dutch photographer has been one of the most well-known and interesting artists in her country. Her subject, which she has pursued almost obsessively since her beginnings in the mid-1990s and continues to vary, is portraits of young girls in the transitional stage from childhood to womanhood. With as much technical perfection as emotional empathy, she succeeds in capturing the fragile state of "puberty" in images that are touching, often disturbing, and surprising in their independent, now unmistakable aesthetic. Van Meene's models are not p.