Rineke Dijkstra – Portraits

During the past ten years, Rineke Dijkstra has achieved world fame on the art scene with her impressive portrait series. In the early 1990s she began working on beach portraits, austere frontal photographs of young people on the beaches of the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Gabun and the Ukraine. In this series, Rineke Dijkstra concentrated on the moment in which a pose began to develop. Hesitation and uncertainty are evident in her subjects’ attitudes and expressions and refer to the existential loneliness of the adolescent. The backgrounds, limited only by the choice of cropping, the rather low camera angle and the use of a flash, clarify the often culturally defined details in the pictures.

Rineke Dijkstra – Portraits combines around seventy photographs selected from the most important series, as well as her two major videos, to form a general overview of the work of the Dutch photographer, born in 1959. In addition to the beach photos there are portraits of mothers immediately after the birth of their children, bullfighters, girls from the Buzzclub, photographs taken in the Berlin zoo, and portraits of male and female Israeli soldiers.

The exhibition was curated by Hripsimé Visser and Urs Stahel. A collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.