Rineke Dijkstra
| Rineke Dijkstra | |
|---|---|
Dijkstra in 2011
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| Born |
2 June 1959 Sittard, Netherlands |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Education | Rietveld Academie |
| Notable work | Beach Portraits, Almerisa, Olivier, The Buzzclub, Daniel, Adi, Shira, and Keren, Rishonim High School, Herzliya, Israel |
Rineke Dijkstra (born 2 June 1959) is a Dutch photographer. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
Dijkstra attended the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1986. She then spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports.
Dijkstra concentrates on single portraits, and usually works in series, looking at groups such as adolescents, clubbers, and soldiers, from the Beach Portraits of 1992 and on, to the video installation Buzzclub/Mysteryworld (1996-1997), Tiergarten Series (1998-2000), Israeli soldiers (1999-2000), and the single-subject portraits in serial transition: Almerisa (1994-2005), Shany (2001-2003), Olivier (2000-2003), and Park Portraits (2005-2006). Her subjects are often shown standing, facing the camera, against a minimal background. This compositional style is perhaps most notable in her beach portraits, which generally feature one or more adolescents against a seascape. This style is again seen in her studies of women who have just given birth.
Dijkstra dates her artistic awakening to a 1991 self-portrait. Taken with a 4-by-5-inch camera after she had emerged from a swimming pool — therapy to recover from a bicycle accident — it presents her in a state of near-collapse. Commissioned by a Dutch newspaper to make photographs based on the notion of summertime, she then took photographs of adolescent bathers. This project resulted in Beach Portraits (1992–94), a series of full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine, and Croatia. The series brought her to international prominence after it was exhibited in 1997 in the annual show of new photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; in 1999, the museum showed Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993, a color photograph of a teenage boy on a beach, next to Cézanne's Male Bather (1885-1887).
Begun during Dijkstra's residency at the DAAD, Berlin in 1998-1999, the Tiergarten series (1998-2000) shows portraits of adolescent girls and boys photographed in the Tiergarten Park in Berlin, as well as in another park in Lithuania. Another series of works by was commissioned by the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam for their new building: portraits of adolescent schoolgirls with their best friends, a poignant reminder that any girl could be an "Anne Frank" in unlucky circumstances. These portraits were primarily taken in Berlin, though Dijkstra later expanded her subjects to include Milan, Barcelona, and Paris.
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