Rineke Dijkstra Makes the Awkward Sublime

3 minute read
Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992Sometimes Dijkstra’s subjects accidentally assumed poses that recall classic art, like this tentative Polish girl who falls unaware into the postures of a Botticelli Venus. Positioning modern figures in ancient attitudes is a centuries-old tactic of painters. Winslow Homer organized the children at play in Snap the Whip to recall the line of putti in Donatello’s Cantoria in Florence. Thomas Eakins positioned one of the boys in The Swimming Hole in the silhouette of The Dying Gaul. But Dijkstra never poses or coaxes her subjects. Maybe those positions are in our DNA.Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
By Richard Lacayo

Even before everybody had a digital camera, it was a universal modern skill to take photographs. But more than that, for a long time it’s been a universal skill to be photographed. For several decades now, everybody has known how to put on his or her game face and wait for the click. Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra has become famous by taking that as her point of departure, then wondering what happens when we can’t hold the pose. The answer: a moment of truth. One thing you learn at the new Dijkstra retrospective, currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and moving in June to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, is that no matter how much you try to put on the social mask, it keeps slipping.

After graduating from an Amsterdam art school in 1986, Dijkstra, who is 52, made a living for a while shooting portraits for a Dutch business magazine. It was frustrating work, taking pictures of executives who knew all too well how to keep up their guard. Eventually, she returned to more personal picture-taking. Very quickly, Dijkstra found an international audience. For her breakthrough project in the early ’90s, she persuaded teenagers at beaches in the U.S. and Europe to pose against a bare backdrop of sky, sea and shore. The fascination of those pictures comes partly from the mind’s attempt to reconcile the “timeless” setting with the sometimes awkward, and often futile, attempts by the teens to assume the attitudes of glamor and cool they think the camera requires.

Hoping to catch people with their defenses down, Dijkstra started to photograph them in the aftermath of some exhausting event. She got women to pose soon after giving birth, usually standing naked while they cradled their newborns. By 1994 she was also making portraits of Portuguese forcados—amateur bullfighters who enter the ring in unarmed groups to subdue the bulls bare-handed. She photographed them right after they returned from the fight, bloody, scuffed and dented.

To watch someone evolve from youth into adult awareness, Dijkstra has sometimes followed a single subject for years—a French boy who joins the foreign legion, a Bosnian refugee girl as she grows up in the Netherlands—as his or her life goes through changes. Or, as she did with the kids on beaches, she will go to parks and photograph very contemporary people in a setting that pulls them out of time—but only so far. And to make sure her pictures don’t take on a false timelessness, Dijkstra makes sure each one carries in its title the very real location in which it was taken and the date.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective is on display from Feb. 18 through May 28 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will open at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City on June 29.

Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993Djikstra prefers to photograph young people because they are still unformed—at the threshold moment when their responses to the camera are not perfectly fixed. Set against “timeless” backgrounds that suggest both antiquity and geological time outside history altogether, her early series of pictures made at seashores also present kids who are very recognizably from the 1990s, like this boy on the shore of the Black Sea. All spindly arms and legs, he becomes a perfect emblem of the ungainly but all the same beautiful human animal. Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992Sometimes Dijkstra’s subjects accidentally assumed poses that recall classic art, like this tentative Polish girl who falls unaware into the postures of a Botticelli Venus. Positioning modern figures in ancient attitudes is a centuries-old tactic of painters. Winslow Homer organized the children at play in Snap the Whip to recall the line of putti in Donatello’s Cantoria in Florence. Thomas Eakins positioned one of the boys in The Swimming Hole in the silhouette of The Dying Gaul. But Dijkstra never poses or coaxes her subjects. Maybe those positions are in our DNA. Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Hilton Head Island, S.C., USA, June 24, 1992Oddly, this American girl also has a bit of Botticelli in her pose, though she probably arrived at that posture while attempting to imitate the poses she knew from the models and advertisements in fashion magazines. As Dijkstra came to realize, in the early 1990s, American teens were far more aware of mass media conventions of beauty and cool than kids from Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall had only come down a few years before. At the girl’s feet you can see the marks left in the sand by the many attempts she made to assume just the right attitude. But her face still betrays a note of anxiety about whether she got it “right”. Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Long Island, N. Y., USA, July 1, 1993Sometimes the teens in Dijkstra’s pictures simply fall into exceptionally elegant poses, like these two from Long Island, who have the long-limbed suavity of Renaissance courtiers.Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal, May 8, 1994In the Portuguese version of bullfighting, forcados are amateur fighters—they all have days jobs—who subdue the bull without weapons. Dijkstra’s portrait was made right after the fight. The blood and bruises and rips on his embroidered jackets speak of the distance between the romanticized roles they fulfill and the human costs they pay. Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Chen and Efrat, Herzliya, Israel, March 4, 2002Dijkstra has followed a number of her young subjects over a period of years to watch them grow into themselves. One series follows the evolution of identical twin sisters.Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Sefton Park, Liverpool, England, June 10th, 2006 [A]In the same way that she photographed young people against a background of sea and sky, Dijkstra has often gone into city parks all around Europe and recruited kids she met there to sit for her camera, to arrive at a similar result of “timeless” setting and very contemporary people.Courtesy the Artist & San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Rineke Dijkstra
Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany, June 27, 1999The series of portraits Dijkstra made over a period of years of kids in Berlin’s Tiergarten park sometimes make them seem to be hesitating at the threshold of their own maturity.Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Vondelpark, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 10, 2005Part of the fascination of this group portrait is the faint echo it carries of Manet’s famous painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), which was first shown in 1863, of four figures relaxing at a picnic lunch in a wooded setting. Of course, in Dijkstra’s picture no one is naked, but the frank gaze of the girl at right, with her direct address to the viewer, inevitably brings to mind the seated woman in Manet’s canvas. Collection of the Artist © Rineke Dijkstra
Amy, The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, England, December 22, 2008In the mid-’90s and again around 2009, Dijkstra made photographs and video of young people she met at dance clubs in Liverpool and an Amsterdam suburb. One of them was this imperial blonde named Amy who has the elongated body of a Mannerist Virgin and the searching eyes of an experienced woman—or at least an emerging wannabe. Courtesy the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Rineke Dijkstra

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