Rineke Dijkstra is a photographer who portrays people at a time when their bodies or social roles are changing — adolescents, mothers just after giving birth, soldiers, refugees, people dancing in clubs. She reads the portrait not as the depiction of character but as the relationship between the body in transition and the gaze.
Dijkstra does not make the portrait a representation of a completed identity. By holding frontally in suspension a body that does not yet fit into a social role, she renewed the portrait from the 1990s onward.
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Contents · Table of Contents
Photographing the body before and after it enters a role
Since Beach Portraits she has dealt with people at a time of change — adolescents in puberty, mothers just after giving birth, soldiers, refugee girls*1.
Frontality creates tension, not classification
Through a plain background and frontality, small signs become visible — the placing of the hands, the spread of the legs, the gaze, the skin, the tension in the shoulders*1.
Extending into the act of viewing itself
In the video work Night Watching, by photographing people looking at Rembrandt, she makes the gaze of the viewer — not only the portrait — her subject*5.