Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene explores the conundrum of young womanhood; her portraits concentrate on subjects who share a similar background to her own, but are a few years younger. The work on show in Edinburgh is different in one regard only: the models are Japanese. Otherwise the themes (young women's subjectivity, our ways of reading images of them) remain the same.
The exhibition's limitation is that Van Meene's approach is hardly novel, and feels less so given these new, emphatically "other", oriental models. The mystery of femininity, a well-trodden concept, is amplified here by the differences that Van Meene revels in as she takes the photographs: the various conventions of posing, the clash of Japanese and US iconography in the girls' dress, the reality behind the Japanese cult of girlhood. But she is not the first to incorporate such cultural difference into finished work.
Where these images do work quite powerfully, though, is in their bittersweet focus on the pressure and pleasure of being young and female. What Van Meene shows us is a private world of secret narratives and still-forming desires. Her subjects look away - we can't tell whether in boredom or cheekiness. We can't read the poses: sometimes they are kitsch, other times gawkily erotic, often self-consciously derivative. A girl peers through sheets of white gauzy fabric and there is an echo of the young Monroe; another in a kimono has wild, Medusa-like hair.
Mild controversy surrounded the opening of this exhibition, due to the inclusion of an image in which a girl (in fact a 24-year-old model) in just her bra and skirt is bent over the side of a bed. Such controversy is misplaced, but there is an uneasiness to some of Van Meene's photographs. For every image of sugar-coated teen-mag beauty, there is another of a girl not quite fitting in, not wearing girlhood well. If you have ever been female and 14, in Japan or anywhere else, the oscillation between these two moods will take you back to the best and worst of it.
· Until March 10. Details: 0131-248 2983.
