Rineke Dijkstra photographs people, preferably children and teenagers, portrays them, but does not stage them, rather peering with her camera directly into the interior of her models and thus creates images of great intimacy, which fascinate the viewer and allow them to get up close.
(...) Continue readingRineke Dijkstra – A motoring accident brought the artistic turn
Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard in the Netherlands on 2 June 1959. She studied from 1981 to 1986 at the Gerrit Rietvold Akademie in Amsterdam and subsequently worked as a freelance photographer for renowned magazines such as Avenue, Elegance and Elle. Rineke Dijkstra had already held her first solo exhibition in the Amsterdam Galerie de Moor in 1984 whilst still studying. In her first years as a photographer, she took portraits of important business people and entrepreneurs for a business magazine. In the process, she felt increasingly irritated and repelled by the self-confident demeanour of those portrayed, who often posed in front of the camera with great self-confidence. Following a serious car accident, Dijkstra was doomed to inactivity for several months and began swimming regularly to avoid the threat of hip surgery. During her visits to the indoor pool, she portrayed herself, depicting her own insecurity and vulnerability in the picture. The result touched her, and she decided to use this experience as the basis for her further work.
International breakthrough with the ‘Beach Portraits’
Immediately after her recovery, Rineke Dijkstra started pursuing her newly discovered artistic approach. She initially asked her friends to pose for her in swimsuits on the beach, but the resulting pictures seemed to the artist to be too fake or posed, so that she completely abandoned this first attempt. It took a 13-year-old girl to first deliver the desired result, which led to an extended series, and for an entire decade, from 1992 to 2002, Dijkstra photographed children and teenagers in swimwear on European and American beaches. These so-called ‘Beach Portraits’ brought the international breakthrough for the artist in the 1990s. The public were fascinated with the pictures, which neither staged nor paraded the models but still depicted them in a very intimate and at the same time distanced way. Dijkstra remained consistently true to her successful style in the years that followed. For her ‘New Mothers’ series, she took nude photographs of young mothers with their infants, and for ‘The Buzz Club’, she portrayed teenage dancers in a Liverpool club.
Making people visible and changing perceptions
Rineke Dijkstra observes her models, talks to them, strives to capture something characteristic about them, to document the interior of the soul in the exterior of the image. As an artist, she takes a step back, consciously refrains from styling the pictures, and endeavours to accentuate the photographed persons with their different facets. This also includes the fact that she never photographs people without their knowledge, and only with their express consent. The act of photographing is simultaneously an encounter between photographer and model. Naming Joy Ross and Diane Arbus as her most important role models, Rineke Dijkstra wishes to build a relationship with her models, and for this, she ultimately leaves the styling of the image to them, which is carried equally by the skill of the photographer and the essence of the person photographed. In this way, Rineke Dijkstra fights against prejudices – her own, and those of her audience.
Rineke Dijkstra - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
