Hidden Inside Portraiture -- "Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective" at the Guggenheim Museum

Rineke Dijkstra. The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK, 2009. Four-channel HD video projection, with sound, 32 min., looped.

Portraiture has been a major category in photography ever since the invention of modern photography. Over the years, photographers keep on looking for new breakthroughs in portraiture. How much inner emotion is contained in a portrait? How do photographers present their unique style through portraiture?

Based in the Netherlands, photographer Rineke Dijkstra (1959-) targets on adolescents. Her photography series has won her a number of awards since the 1990s and established her name internationally. “Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum this summer presented her career over the past twenty years through approximately eighty pieces of work. It was her first major museum solo exhibition in the North America. The significance thus cannot be overlooked.

Dijkstra attended the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1986. After graduation, she worked commercially for a few years, which frustrated her. A bike accident happened in 1991 became a turning point in her career. Five months of rehabilitation, which involved exhausting swimming everyday, allowed her to rethink her career. One day in June, she took a self-portrait right after getting out of the pool. Her outside exhaustion as well as her emotional state was expressed through the portrait. Dijkstra found that when she was exhausted, she paid less attention to her pose, and thus the unconsciously natural pose shown in the photograph. The self-portrait was the starting point of her art career. Since then, she has been working on various series of portraiture.

“Beach Portraits” (1992-1994) is a series of portraiture of adolescents standing at beaches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Ukraine, and Croatia. The pose and expression of the figures are clearly presented in front of the viewer, as every single portrait is a nearly life-sized full-body portrait. The figures are presented with a monumental sense, as the camera is placed looking up from a lower angle. The minimal color and outline of the beach provides a background that creates a certain atmosphere and helps the viewer concentrate on the figures. Looking at the camera, the figures present certain shyness. The uneasiness of adolescence is fully expressed in the portraiture. “Beach Portraits” was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997, which brought the name of Dijkstra to the international stage.

Dijkstra has also photographed individuals repeatedly over the course of several months or years. “Almerisa” series began in 1994 with a single photograph of a young Bosnian girl at a Dutch refugee center for asylum-seekers. Dijkstra continued to photograph Almerisa for more than a decade as she grew from a young girl to a woman, and became a mother. Over the years, Almerisa dyed her hair, followed fashion, and her transition signaled the gradual integration to western European culture from east European culture. Her own maturity and the changes brought by the environment are presented in the series of eleven photographs. Similarly, the series of “Olivier” (2002-2003) follows a young man through the years of his military service, photographing both his physical and psychological development.

Dijkstra started making videos from mid-1990s. Her videos, which manifest the figures in the frame, are very much like her photographs. In “The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/ Mystery World, Zaandam, NL” (1996-1997), a two-channel projection, teenagers stand in front of a white wall individually. Mostly ignoring the camera, they smoke, drink, or dance to the background music. “The Krazyhouse” (2009) has the similar technique. Dijkstra looked for teenagers in a club in Liverpool, UK, and asked them to dance to their favorite music. Projected on the four walls of the gallery are six teenagers dancing in different styles to different music. Their personality and self-expression is presented within the timeframe of a song—from the more self-conscious state at the beginning to later when they cannot resist the rhythm of music. “I See A Woman Crying (Weeping Woman),” a three-channel projection from the same year, differs from the usual single-person presentation—a group of young schoolchildren are in the camera at the same time. They were asked to respond to Picasso’s painting “Weeping Woman,” which never appears in the frame. The camera goes back and forth between the faces of the children. Within fifteen minutes, their discussion goes from describing the painting to assuming why the woman was crying. The process reflects their ideas and inner thoughts.

Dijkstra emphasizes the “transitional state.” No matter the embarrassment of the adolescence, the increase of age, the maturity of mind, or the change causes by specific events, they are all targets of her photography. Although photography is a modern media, the color and size of her portraiture recall 17th century Dutch paintings. The relationship between the photographer and the subject, and between the viewer and the viewed is strongly presented in her works.


（Originally published in《ART TAIPEI FORUM media》Vol.20, October 2012）