Rineke Dijkstra

Choosing Photography

Dijkstra initially enrolled in a teacher-training program in crafts and visual arts, but felt it did not suit her. Around age nineteen, using a camera borrowed from a friend prompted her to pursue photography. After taking a photography course, she entered the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1981. She has recalled that she had been strongly drawn to observing people since childhood.^*1 At the De Moor Cultural Centre, Hans Aarsman encouraged her to photograph people. A workshop in Rome taught by Corinne Noordenbos helped shift her from treating the figure as one element in the frame toward portraits built on a direct, face-to-face encounter with the sitter.^*2 She later photographed young people at the Paradiso club. Dijkstra has described photography as a medium through which she can examine how people change. Comparing photographs revealed differences in gaze and expression that she had not noticed with the naked eye, an experience that informed her later long-term series.^*1

Her graduation work reflected the staged photography that became prominent in the 1980s. She subsequently made commissioned portraits for magazines including Quote, Elle, and Elegance, as well as for corporate clients.^*2 In commissioned work, sitters often arrived with a fixed idea of how they wanted to appear. Dijkstra came to feel constrained by the need to satisfy that expectation while also recording what she herself perceived in the person. Hripsimé Visser describes Beach Portraits as her first fully self-directed project, begun from the need to move beyond the limits of commissioned work.^*2 Jennifer Eileen Quick’s 2008 study interprets Dijkstra’s shift from early professional portraiture to the independent work of the 1990s as a move away from constructing images that fit social roles and toward portraits in which self-presentation and bodily response do not fully coincide.^*3 A photograph can hold, in the same frame, the pose chosen by the subject, the conditions established by the photographer, and glances, tension, balance, and gestures that neither fully controls. This capacity became the basis of Dijkstra’s independent portraiture.

The Turn of Self-Portrait

In 1990, Dijkstra fractured her hip in a bicycle accident. After a long recovery, she took up swimming as rehabilitation.^*38 The following year, after swimming thirty laps, she photographed her exhausted body in Self-Portrait, Marnixbad, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 19, 1991. She has explained that the intensity of her fatigue left little energy for thinking about a pose, allowing her posture to emerge more unconsciously.^*5 The photograph did not expose a “true self.” It registered a mismatch between the effort to compose one’s appearance and a fatigued body that would not fully comply. Establishing that discrepancy within a single portrait led directly to the method of Beach Portraits.^*6

The Frontal Portrait Tradition

By the early 1990s, when Beach Portraits began, frontal portraits made under consistent conditions and presented as a series already belonged to several photographic traditions. August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century linked individuals to social structure through clothing, occupation, class, and gesture. In postwar Germany, the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher were followed by artists such as Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, who redirected objectivity, repetition, and large-scale photography toward different questions. Quick places Dijkstra’s clear realism at the intersection of the New Objectivity lineage and the languages of American portraiture associated with Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus.^*3 Dijkstra inherited frontality and repetition and redirected them toward people in the process of acquiring a social image. Her portraits leave both social type and psychological certainty unresolved.

Dijkstra’s portraits are not premised on the idea that a person’s inner life appears transparently in a photograph. Sitters become aware of the camera and arrange themselves accordingly, but their gestures also carry patterns learned through age, clothing, gender, peers, occupation, and state institutions.^*3 Fatigue, tension, a shifting stance, or a change in gaze can also resist that self-staging. Frontality, spare backgrounds, extended sitting times, serial work, and video allowed Dijkstra to record the mismatch between self-presentation and bodily or social pressures without reducing it to personality.

Self-Presentation and Pose

In Dijkstra’s frontal portraits, sitters choose their own stance and gaze. In a 1998 interview with Claire Bishop, discussed by Quick, Dijkstra described what she sought as a “natural portrait” and explained that she gave very few detailed instructions, allowing each person to decide how to pose.^*3 The effort to appear natural itself becomes visible in posture and expression. Katy Siegel’s “Real People” argues that efforts at self-presentation reveal both social position and individual habits. Quick develops this point by describing a subject who is neither determined entirely by society nor free to invent any identity at will, but continually adjusts the image of the self between those forces.^*3 A long sitting can encompass the initial pose, its revisions, the easing of tension, and renewed awareness of the camera. The waiting is not a strategy for exposing an unguarded “real face.” It gives photographic form to the instability of self-presentation.

Why She Photographs Young People

Dijkstra has repeatedly photographed people from adolescence into early adulthood. By her own account, youth was not a predetermined subject. An early Beach Portraits session with a thirteen-year-old girl deepened her interest in an age when emotions and self-image have not yet settled and their uncertainty is more likely to register in posture and expression.^*7 Visser likewise explains that adults tend to be more conscious of pose and appearance when photographed, which helped direct Dijkstra’s attention toward children and young people.^*2 In a 2020 Financial Times interview, Dijkstra cited the fact that young people are not yet fixed and still contain many possibilities as a reason she photographs them.^*8

Her interest therefore centers on the formation of self-image through clothing, body culture, peer groups, gender norms, class, and regional difference, not on an idealized image of youth. In Beach Portraits, Dijkstra was attentive to differences between young people at affluent American resorts, where body culture and fashion magazines shaped self-presentation, and young people in Poland soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall.^*7 Julian Stallabrass reads this comparison as a record of young people being socialized into commercial image culture.^*9 Quick similarly argues that in Buzzclub, clothing, displays of sexual attractiveness, and peer pressure cannot be separated from the subjects’ understanding of themselves.^*3 Adolescence and early adulthood are periods in which bodily development coincides with testing behaviors learned from others as one’s own. Dijkstra repeatedly photographed this stage because the incomplete fit between individual intention and socially learned codes remains especially legible in the body.

Spare Backgrounds

Spare backgrounds remove the sitter from a descriptive domestic or social setting and concentrate attention on posture and bodily detail. The Guggenheim retrospective transcript explains that Dijkstra isolates subjects from context to direct attention toward detail; indoors, she removes furniture, and in New Mothers she used the white walls of the women’s homes as backgrounds.^*5 In Beach Portraits, sea and sky function as an almost constant stage, with few buildings or tourist markers to identify place. In a 1998 review, Jennifer Higgie argued that the repeated format intensifies small differences—a clenched fist, the tilt of a pelvis, skin, scars, and hair.^*10 A study published online in 2025 and included in a 2026 journal issue places the series at an intersection of modernist photography, deadpan, seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and conceptual repetition through the idea of “non-specificity.”^*11 Removing contextual information leaves posture, clothing, bodily detail, and the viewer’s own habit of judging people through those signs in sharper relief.

This reduction of information does not simply free the individual from context. Stallabrass calls the frontal, centered, repetitive format, sparse backgrounds, and large, highly detailed prints “quasi-ethnographic”: a form that can encourage empathy with individuals while also holding multiple bodies at a comparative distance.^*9 A pared-down image intended to resist typology can become, on the museum wall, a format for inspecting people one by one. The tension between a portrait that insists on individual specificity and a gaze that compares and classifies is built into Dijkstra’s method.

Seriality and Time

From early in her career, Dijkstra favored series built through repeated conditions over selecting a single “definitive” image. She has said that when she began Beach Portraits, working serially gave her a firmer way to address the subject.^*1 A single portrait can easily fix the clothing, posture, or social role of one moment as if it defined the person. Placing different people within the same format—or returning to the same person over years, as in Almerisa and Olivier—prevents any one moment from functioning as a final image of the subject.

Quick analyzes Almerisa and Dijkstra’s series on the soldier Evgenya as examples in which a person’s changing social role never resolves into a representative type.^*3 Stallabrass likewise sees in Almerisa the passage of a refugee child adapting to the culture of her host country through clothing and body language.^*9 Repeated conditions preserve what has changed alongside what has remained. In Dijkstra’s serial portraits, self-image never arrives at a single finished form; it continues to be revised as environments and roles change.

Time in Video

A still photograph fixes a single moment of self-presentation. Video can record, within the same duration, both the effort to maintain an appearance and the body’s changes over time. After making photographs for Buzzclub, Dijkstra reviewed the contact sheets and felt that the movement and sound that created the club’s atmosphere were missing from the still images; she returned the following year to work in video.^*12 Video can include speech, music, and ambient sound, and can follow the periods when a person is conscious of the camera, becomes absorbed in music or movement, and then becomes aware of being filmed again.^*12 Self-presentation appears as an action that changes through duration, not as a fixed pose.

Speaking about The Krazyhouse and The Gymschool, Dijkstra has said that she leaves key decisions open during filming, allowing improvisation and unexpected events to enter the work.^*13 In The Gymschool, girls are arranged in age order from eight to twelve; as their technical skill increases, the work tracks simultaneous changes in bodily control and expressive freedom.^*13 Jennifer Blessing’s decision to devote a separate essay to Dijkstra’s video work in the 2012 retrospective catalogue likewise positions moving-image work as a second form of portraiture concerned with self-presentation changing over time, not as an adjunct to the photographs.^*14

Beach Portraits

Beach Portraits began in 1992 and consists of full-length portraits, made on beaches in Europe and the United States, primarily of children and young people. One of its best-known works, Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993, shows a boy standing full-length against sand, sea, and sky. MoMA notes that his effort to project adult confidence instead heightens his awkwardness.^*15 Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992, the sitter’s hip-shifted stance has prompted comparisons with classical contrapposto and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.^*16 Dijkstra, however, gave few detailed directions about posture or expression in the series. She photographed the process in which a pose took shape and then loosened over the course of waiting.^*2 Jacques Rancière discusses the work as a social photograph of an age group in transition while also noting how its frontality and large exhibition scale give it an enigma akin to classical portrait painting.^*17

The series also records regional differences in the early 1990s, shortly after the Cold War. Dijkstra has recalled seeing young people at Hilton Head Island in the United States who were highly conscious of their bodies under the influence of affluent resort culture and fashion magazines, while in Poland in 1992 she found less self-consciousness about fashion and felt the social differences of the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall.^*7 The Städel Museum likewise situates Beach Portraits within the social changes of the 1990s, noting Dijkstra’s use of the same compositional structure for young people in different countries.^*6 Higgie points to the individual differences that remain forceful within the repeated composition: clenched hands, the spread of the legs, wet swimsuits, hair, and gaze.^*10 Recent scholarship describes this structure through “non-specificity”: the subjects carry information about place and generation without becoming representative examples of either.^*11

New Mothers and Bullfighters

New Mothers (1994) and Bullfighters (1994, 2000) extend to adult portraiture the condition Dijkstra discovered in her post-accident self-portrait: photographing someone immediately after an intense bodily experience. Of the three mothers photographed in 1994, Julie was photographed one hour after giving birth, Tecla one day after, and Saskia one week after. The forcados in Bullfighters were photographed immediately after a bullfight, with blood and dirt still on their bodies.^*18 Writing on New Mothers, Laurie Hurwitz notes that sweat, blood, postpartum underwear, and sanitary products remain in the frame, far removed from idealized images of mother and child.^*19 The social roles of “mother” and “bullfighter” appear alongside the exhaustion, wounds, and dirt left by childbirth or the bullfight, preventing these recently assumed roles from settling into completed types.

Dijkstra photographed the women in their homes while excluding furniture, pictures, and other descriptive elements of their surroundings, concentrating the image on the body and the act of holding the child.^*5 For Alison Dean, the issue extends beyond whether the photographs reveal the “truth” of the postpartum body to the forms of intimacy and distance produced among photographer, subject, and viewer when that body is publicly displayed as a photograph.^*20 New Mothers therefore places a non-idealized image of the postpartum body alongside the question of how another person looks at it.

Almerisa and Soldiers

Almerisa began with a photograph made in 1994 of a girl who had arrived in the Netherlands from Bosnia, photographed in a refugee reception center, and continued through eleven images until 2008.^*21 An interview with the National Portrait Gallery of Australia notes that Almerisa chose her own clothes for each sitting, while Dijkstra retained the chair as a recurring element that allowed photographs from different moments to be compared.^*22 MoMA describes how growth and adaptation from Eastern European to Western European life register through changes in clothing, hairstyle, furniture, posture, and family structure.^*23 Quick resists reading the series as a linear story in which adaptation entails the loss of an authentic self. She instead analyzes it as a process in which individual choices and external social conditions are reconfigured at each stage.^*3 By photographing the same person in the same format over time, no single image becomes a final portrait that stands for her.

In the series on soldiers, bodily change is compounded by the institutions of the state and the military. Olivier (2000–2003) follows a young man who joined the French Foreign Legion, recording physical and psychological changes from enlistment through continued service.^*24 Israel Portraits began with a 1999 commission from the Herzliya Museum of Art to photograph people in Israel; Dijkstra photographed young soldiers both in barracks and at home while on leave. Gil Pasternak treats the series as one of the works in Dijkstra’s oeuvre most directly conditioned by national politics, arguing that the photographs make visible the social position military service inscribes on the individual body.^*25 Uniforms, training, and conscription alter bodies and behavior, yet the sitters never collapse into types that simply represent the institution.

Buzz Club and Night Watching

The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK / Mystery World, Zaandam, NL 1996–97 is a two-channel video for which Dijkstra set up a temporary white-background studio inside clubs and filmed young people one at a time. MACBA describes the club as a social space where young people, away from parental supervision, try out clothing and bodily presentation and test their sexual attractiveness.^*26 Small actions—smoking a cigarette, drinking beer, dancing to music—continue through the videos. Against the white background, each person’s behavior is sustained in isolation from the club crowd.^*12 In The Krazyhouse, each subject chooses a favorite song and dances alone, allowing gestures shaped by awareness of the camera to coexist with immersion in the music.^*13

In later videos, Dijkstra extended her attention from bodily self-presentation to the act of looking at art. I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) (2009) films children looking at Picasso’s Weeping Woman, kept outside the frame, as they use words to infer the woman’s emotions and circumstances.^*27 Night Watching (2019) is a three-channel video of fourteen groups of museum visitors responding to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch; the painting itself never appears on screen.^*28 Since the late 1980s, Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs has placed historical works of art and the visitors who look at them within the same photographic frame.^*29 Dijkstra leaves only the viewers’ words and reactions in the video, so the act of looking unfolds through multiple interpretations that continue over time.

Sander and Arbus

Dijkstra and August Sander share frontality and serial form, but differ in how they relate the individual to social type. Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century organized sitters by occupation and class, linking individual portraits to the structure of German society in his time. Quick argues that while Sander’s subjects are comparatively legible as representatives of occupations and classes, Dijkstra uses a similarly clear realism to expose the unstable fit between social position and individual.^*3 Dijkstra herself has praised Sander’s The Student for the way its focus on the sitter’s eyes preserves individual character and dignity within a social type.^*30 Dijkstra inherited the problem of holding individual presence and social code within the same photographic conditions while leaving classification unresolved.

Comparison with Diane Arbus shifts the emphasis to the subject’s self-presentation. Katy Siegel’s “Real People,” published in a 2001 exhibition catalogue, became an important early essay that approached Dijkstra through both Sander and Arbus.^*31 Drawing on Siegel, Quick places Dijkstra’s portraits between Sander’s sociological legibility and the psychologically unsettling portraiture associated with Arbus.^*3 An effort to appear as oneself reveals both socially learned gestures and individual habits.^*3 SFMOMA describes Arbus’s portraiture as an exploration of appearance and identity, performance and reality.^*32 Dijkstra repeatedly worked through this discrepancy between self-presentation and the photographic image in controlled settings such as beaches, white walls, barracks, and clubs.

Ruff and Deadpan

Thomas Ruff’s Porträts and Dijkstra’s portraits share frontality, repetition, and large-scale color, but diverge in how they treat the possibility of reading psychology from a person’s surface. Ruff systematically used everyday clothing, frontal orientation, even lighting, and neutral expression to make enormous, highly detailed faces while refusing the expectation that such detail would reveal inner character. MoMA identifies this failure of psychological access despite technical precision as central to the series.^*33 Stallabrass treats Ruff as an extreme case in which increased visual information does not stabilize meaning, and argues that Dijkstra shares a “quasi-ethnographic” format of frontality, repetition, and large, high-resolution photographs.^*9

In Dijkstra’s work, surface information does more than block psychological interpretation. The effort to hold a posture, the placement of hands, the way a uniform sits on the body, or clothing learned from peers all provide information about the sitter, but none functions as proof of character. As Stallabrass notes, the format can create both a sense of proximity to the subject and the distance of examining a specimen.^*9 The contradiction between an image that respects individual specificity and a museum display that makes bodies available for comparison is one of the critical tensions in Dijkstra’s portraiture.

Goldin and Intimacy

Comparison with Nan Goldin turns on how intimacy is produced through the photographic relationship. MoMA describes The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as an installation of 35mm slides and a soundtrack assembled from years of photographs of private relationships, conflicts, and living environments within Goldin’s own social circle.^*34 When ICA Boston placed the two artists in dialogue, it contrasted Goldin’s photographs of intimates in the midst of lived events with Dijkstra’s stripped-down settings, still poses, and extended observation of people at turning points in their lives.^*35

Alison Dean complicates any simple opposition between Goldin as insider and Dijkstra as outsider. Instead of reducing the photographer-subject relation to empathy versus voyeurism, she asks what kinds of intimacy photographer, subject, and viewer form through the photograph.^*20 In New Mothers, the removal of domestic surroundings and the frontal presentation of the nude postpartum body bring a private bodily experience into a public exhibition space. Goldin built her portraits through the shared experience and memory of a community; Dijkstra maintains distance from the sitter and makes the relationship established during the session part of the photograph. Their difference lies less in the degree of intimacy than in the time and photographic relationship through which it is produced.

Critical Reception and Current Position

From the earliest criticism, Dijkstra’s photographs have resisted being reduced to images that simply “capture an unguarded moment.” A 1998 conversation with Claire Bishop, cited by Quick, already addressed the simultaneous presence of staging and naturalness.^*3 That same year, Jennifer Higgie described the work as retaining the artifice produced by photography itself instead of claiming to expose the subject’s secrets.^*10 In 2001, Katy Siegel read the work through the intersection of social type and psychological portraiture; in 2007, Stallabrass added a critique of ethnographic classification and the power of observation in the museum.^*9 Quick’s 2008 study systematized these debates through the problem of contemporary subjectivity, in which individual choice and social conditions continue to be negotiated within a single portrait.^*3

Around the same period, Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before discussed Dijkstra alongside Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth as key artists in his account of large-scale photography and its relation to the viewer.^*36 From another direction, Jacques Rancière described Dijkstra’s young people, mothers, and bullfighters as records of changing social types that, through frontality and exhibition scale, also acquire the enigma of classical portrait painting.^*17 Together, these accounts move discussion beyond the psychology of the sitter toward the kind of figure a photograph produces in an exhibition space and the distance it establishes between viewer and subject.

In the 2012 SFMOMA/Guggenheim retrospective, Sandra S. Phillips discussed roughly two decades of portraits as work that extracts temporary states—especially those of young people—from the flow of time, while Jennifer Blessing considered the video works in a separate essay.^*14 Phillips argues that the scale and physical proximity of Dijkstra’s photographs make these temporary states particularly memorable.^*4 In 2017, Dijkstra received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.^*24 Berlinische Galerie’s 2024–25 exhibition Still — Moving surveyed photographs and videos from 1992 to 2024 as a sustained portrait project.^*37 Dijkstra’s place in photographic history rests on her sustained examination of the points at which self-presentation, social role, bodily response, the photographer’s conditions, and the viewer’s interpretation fail to align, across frontal portraiture, serial work, and video.