Strike a Pose

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 their game face and wait for the click. The 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 (SFMOMA) 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. (Why do you think they call those guys “suits”?) Eventually, she returned to more-personal picture taking, with an eye to inspirations that might seem contradictory: August Sander, who inventoried typical Germans in the 1920s and ’30s, and Diane Arbus, who had no interest in anything typical but a taste for social outliers. What interested Dijkstra was how both photographers made you see private individuals inside the public categories–teacher and farmer for Sander, dwarf and drag queen for Arbus.

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. (See page 49.) But if the settings are timeless, the kids are very much of their time. Some of them, especially the Americans, gamely attempt–and generally fall short of–the postures of allure and cool they think they should assume. As for the teens in Eastern Europe, who grew up in communist societies that locked out Western media, they don’t quite know what the conventions look like. But for all of them, it’s through their very awkwardness that their real power emerges. A Polish girl with a tentative expression falls unknowingly into the pose of a Botticelli Venus. Oddly enough, so does a would-be glamour girl in South Carolina. A boy on a beach in Ukraine, all spindly arms and legs, becomes a perfect emblem of the ungainly human animal.

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. One of these women faces the lens with a slightly dazed expression while a trickle of blood slides down her leg. Dijkstra shot them at home, where most Dutch women give birth, but against bare walls where the closest thing to a touch of domesticity is an electrical outlet. 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. Photographed right after they returned from the fight, bloody, scuffed and dented, these men may well have been too tired to put up a false front. But as with Dijkstra’s pictures of new mothers, the raw strength of these portraits is in the way they insist on the incongruous realities–the hopelessly insufficient Band-Aid, the ripped seam of the embroidered jacket–of a romanticized institution.

By bringing together so many pictures, the Dijkstra retrospective, which was co-curated by Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim and Sandra S. Phillips of SFMOMA, also reveals the limits of portraiture as a way into another person’s psyche. In 1994, Dijkstra met a 6-year-old Bosnian girl in a Dutch refugee center, whom she has photographed periodically ever since. The Almerisa series shows the changes in her dress and demeanor that mark her emergence as a mature woman and mother, yet she remains an unknown quantity. Dijkstra tends to work best in outdoor settings, like the park in Amsterdam where she photographed a lanky boy sitting at the wooded edge of a pond, because there she can offer satisfactions beyond the inner life of her subjects. Much like the water and sky that surround her beachgoers, the boy’s shady enclosure gets the mind busy reconciling this timeless surrounding and this plainly modern kid.

In the mid-’90s and again around 2009, Dijkstra photographed young people she met at dance clubs in Liverpool and an Amsterdam suburb, like the 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. The club-kid portraits led Dijkstra to make videos for which she recruited some of the kids to dance for her individually before a blank backdrop. For minutes at a time, they bust their moves, doing their best to lose themselves. Obviously, they haven’t learned the main lesson of the museum show they’re in: your self is precisely the thing you can never lose.