Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

by Rineke Dijkstra (Photographer), Jennifer Blessing (Contributor), Sandra S. Phillips (Contributor)

This volume is the first comprehensive monograph on Rineke Dijkstra to be published in the United States, accompanying the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artist’s work in photography and video. The catalogue features the Beach Portraits (1992­–2002) and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra’s later work, including her most recent video installations. Also featured are series that the artist has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994– ), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment.

Exhibition curators Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Sandra S. Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, contribute essays accompanied by an interview with the artist by Jan van Adrichem, selected interviews with several of the artist’s subjects, and entries on the artist’s series by Chelsea Spengemann, as well as the most comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography to date.

Genres: Photography, Art

264 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2012

About the author

Rineke Dijkstra is a contemporary Dutch photographer. Known for her single portraits, usually working in series, she often focuses on particular groups and communities of people, such as mothers, adolescent and teenage boys and girls, soldiers, etc., with an emphasis on capturing the vulnerable side of her subjects. “With young people everything is much more on the surface—all the emotions,” the artist observed. “When you get older you know how to hide things.”

Born on June 2, 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands, she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Dijkstra’s seminal series, Beach Portraits (1992–1994), is composed of life-sized color photographs of young teenagers in bathing suits taken on both American and European beaches. The project was shown in 1997 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in New Photography 13, bringing the artist widespread attention and critical acclaim. Dijkstra has gone on to work in video, as seen in her filmed portraits of dancing teenagers, The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL (1996–1997).

She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Rinkeke Dijkstra: A Retrospective,” which was shown at both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2012. The artist currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Goetz Collection in Munich, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Reviews

[William West]

I've now seen this exhibit twice, or I should say, one and a half times. The first time I left half-way through because I found it so uninteresting. I went back a couple of days later and saw the rest, and was only slightly more impressed.

I think that part of what was so off-putting to me the first time I saw the show was a quote by Dijkstra that introduces the exhibit. She claims that children, "those under 20", experience the world in a more "immediate" way because they are in a constant state of growing- "transition", and thus make the best subjects of photography. This struck me as infantile and not in a wise or authentic way. The photos of blank-faced adolescents struck me as pseudo-statements about "transformation." I forgot to really look at them as photographs.

When I returned to the exhibit, Dijkstra's statement about the more "immediate" consciousness of children still struck me as stupid, but I chose to put it out of mind when I looked at the photos. Dijkstra is, technically, a truly gifted photographer. Her colors are amazing. The blues of her sky, the warm autumnal tones of her domestic interiors are almost hypnotic in their lushness. On this point, I can see why the Dutch artist has been described as a "Rembrandt of photography." I would point out, however, that what makes Rembrandt's work so extraordinary is not just his technical mastery of painting, of his amazing capacity to convey shadow and color. There is real drama and psychology in Rembrandt's portraits. I did not see that in Dijkstra's work. Indeed, Dijkstra's penchant for photographing people who have just gone through undeniably intense experiences, such as mothers who have just given birth, seemed to me designed to disguise the artist's lack of understanding and empathy with her subjects.

In general, I found Dijkstra's video work even less rewarding than her photos. The medium of video can not convey the same depth of color and light that film can. So, the aesthetic joy is lost. We're left with Dijkstra's ideas. She devotes huge video installations to extended long takes of young adults dancing in nightclubs, maintaining that the dancers perform for an exterior eye until they recede from self-consciousness and perform for and within themselves. We witness in Dijkstra's subjects, she claims, a state between public and private. There might actually be a bit of truth to this. But we do not need a large scale video installation to learn or experience this. We can, you know, just go to a club...

It was ironic, then, that the only pieces that fully impressed me in the show were the last two video installations. In them, Dijkstra records a group of children as they respond to Picasso's Portrait of a Weeping Woman. In one piece, a group of children are asked to interpret why the woman in the painting is crying. Their responses, some hilarious, others startlingly persuasive, become both a sly commentary on the nature of critical discourse in "adult" society, but also really do tear down the (presumably "adult") viewer's tendency to view children as "other." The second video simply observes one of the children from the previous video attempt, with utter dedication and seriousness, to sketch Picasso's painting as accurately as possible. The only sound was the exaggerated noise of the girl's pencil against paper. Truly a celebration of the power of art to inspire, if nothing else, tenacity in the desire to copy, but also cultivate and grow.

I must say these two videos moved me, but they were the only pieces from this huge exhibition that has filled up not just SF MOMA, but also the New York Guggenheim, that I found genuinely satisfying.

[Seth Wood]

I was somewhat unfamiliar with Dijkstra. Her work is extremely provocative and nuanced. I don't know that it really spoke to me but I can appreciate it's value.

The book itself is based on an exhibition. The book is large and solid with good quality prints.

[Aaron the Pink Donut]

Very workman like but well executed portraits and narrative subjects spanning the artist career.