‘In the 90s, I had focused on single portraits – I now became interested in the relationships between different subjects in one image. Their postures, their expressions, what the similarity of an outfit says or how people distinguish themselves. The best photos, I noticed, always contained a certain contradiction; a kind of tension, both in the figures themselves, or in their relation [to one another].’
R. Dijkstra in conversation with L. E. Trail, ‘Rineke Dijkstra’s New Portraits Offer a Diverse Picture of Dutch Society’, in AnOther Magazine, December 2023
‘I try to capture a certain naturalness, but the large camera makes people very aware that they are being observed. There’s always something that resides between the pose and the natural and you must find that balance. What really interests me is the line between how people present themselves and what I see, and what I capture. You try to capture a kind of truth of course, or something truthful.’
R. Dijkstra in conversation with A. Kubler, Vault Magazine, no. 39, Spring 2022
‘For the video Marianna, [...] I used three cameras to film a young girl rehearsing before an audition for a place at the prestigious Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, which focuses on training its students to perform in the Mariinsky Theatre. The girl has to keep rehearsing the same sequence over and over again. The teacher, who remains unseen, issues an uninterrupted flow of instructions, going on and on until it’s almost too much for the viewer to take: “Start over, one more time, smile, extend.” The film shows Marianna’s struggle with technique, but it also explores the question of whether she can still be herself under those circumstances. Is there really such a thing as a “self” in the arts?’
R. Dijkstra, ‘Rineke Dijkstra: Rehearsals’, in Musée Magazine, March 2012
‘While some themes are constant between Buzz Club/Mystery World and Krazyhouse, the years intervening are notably reflected in the latter, both in the individuals represented and the technology used to record them. Nicky looks the most like she could teleport to the Buzz Club and fit right in, both in terms of dress and dance style, but like all of the Krazyhouse crew, she has a wholesome healthiness entirely unknown to the earlier video's smoking, beer-swilling, and apparently drugged-out clubgoers.’
J. Blessing, ‘What We Still Feel: Rineke Dijkstra’s Video’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 35
‘In the later park photographs, I used the landscape more distinctly as a setting to get greater depth in the picture, and I was even more interested in light’s influence on landscape. Light changes not only the surroundings, but the atmosphere too, as it did in the beach photographs. The three-part division of sand, sea, and sky in the beach photographs makes a nearly abstract background that isolates the models, whereas the young people in the parks are surrounded by light and the shade of trees.’
R. Dijkstra, ‘Realism in the Smallest Details. Rineke Dijkstra interviewed by Jan van Adrichem’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 51
‘[M]ilitary service implies that one has to submit to a collective identity. There is always a tension, however, between the values of the individual and the values of the community. I am interested in the paradox between identity and uniformity, in the power and vulnerability of each individual and each group. It is this paradox that I try to visualize by concentrating on poses, attitudes, gestures and gazes.’
R. Dijkstra, in Israel Portraits. Rineke Dijkstra, exh. cat., Herzliya/Tel Aviv: Herzliya Museum of Art and Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery, 2001, p. 5c
‘After a visit of one of the city's [Liverpool] dance clubs, Dijkstra created a series of still photographs of its patrons in an improvised studio in a back room during normal operating hours. This in turn inspired her first work in video, The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK / Mystery World, Zaandam, NL. The video work, likewise shot in a makeshift studio at night, is exhibited as an asynchronous dual projection. With the DJ's mixes audible in the background, some subjects simply stand in front of the camera while they smoke, drink, or, in one instance, make out; others are visibly intoxicated. In the second half of the of the work, in contrast to the Buzz Club’s female-dominated subculture, mostly male teenagers from a Dutch club called Mystery World begin to appear. Prolonged takes of the teens brightly lit against white backgrounds provide ample time to for viewers to consider clothing, movement, and facial expression, all details impossible to examine without such isolation. The pace of the editing slows and the duration of the shots increases as the night wears on.’
C. Spengeman, ‘Plates’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 138
‘The New Mothers series (1994) is a good example of how an idea comes about for me. In these works – and in another series I was making at the time [...] I wanted to investigate whether it was possible to capture opposite emotions in a single image: pain and exhaustion in contrast with relief and euphoria. It was about photographing people immediately after an intense physical and emotional experience.’
R. Dijkstra, ‘Realism in the Smallest Details. Rineke Dijkstra interviewed by Jan van Adrichem’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 48
‘The body of work that perhaps most clearly demonstrated how Dijkstra fashions a conceptual program to reflect more personal interests is the ongoing, multiyear study of Almerisa, which she began in 1994. The project is an extended portrait of an émigré to the Netherlands whom Dijkstra first met at the age of six in a crowded, impersonal refugee center. Almerisa and her family, who are Muslim, had fled the Bosnian war, and Almerisa appears in the first picture of the series as a tiny, solemn girl in a new dress and socks that fail to match her outfit, a subtle disarray that underscores her circumstances. In subsequent photographs, taken roughly every two years wherever Almerisa is living at the time, Dijkstra reduces the situation to its most essential elements. We see the timid girl suddenly immersed in a foreign culture gradually grow into an adolescent and then a young woman living in a prosperous Western European country where she feels comfortable and into which she has assimilated. The series recalls the annual marks of a child’s growth that a parent makes on the kitchen wall, or the annual ritual of a picture made to send grandparents for the holidays. At the same time, in the individual pictures, we can read the various details: the moments when her feet touch the floor, when she starts to use makeup, and when her posture changes to express a kind of physical possession of her environment.’
S. S Phillips, ‘Twenty Years of Looking at People’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 24
‘While working on the Beach Portraits, Dijkstra made a small group of works in urban areas titled Streets [...] the horizon of the sea and sand is replaced by the horizon of masonry wall and sidewalk. [...] With these works, the artist presents her own take on street photography, a genre historically characterized by candid shots of ordinary people moving through the city. Dijkstra opts not to take this classic approach of capturing unguarded moments but rather engages her subjects directly. Stopped and posed still against a neutral ground, who might otherwise have been depicted as anonymous passersby become singular individuals confronting the camera.’
C. Spengeman, ‘Plates’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 96
‘In the summer of 1992 when Dijkstra began the Beach Portraits, she was thirty-three years old and unknown as an artist. By 1998, when she took the last picture in the series, Dijkstra has emerged as one of the most respected and exhibited photographers of her generation. In the Beach Portraits she established her voice as an artist: an empathetic voice that addresses our existential humanness by presenting the subject as a unique individual removed from everyday details and standing vulnerable within the universe.’
C. Ehlers, ‘Rineke Dijkstra's Beach Portraits’, in Rineke Dijkstra. Beach Portraits, exh.cat. Chicago: LaSalle Bank,2002, p.53
‘Rineke Dijkstra photographed children and young people in their swim clothing, or what served as such, on beaches in the Old and New world. Alone, or sometimes in pairs or trios, the boys and girls are portrayed full-length on a small strip of beach in front of the sea and sky, the horizon halfway to their hips, somehow elevated by the low camera angle. [...] The most famous image from the Beach Portraits was taken in Kolobrzeg. It is of a girl, perhaps fifteen years old, in a green bathing suit. Her surroundings, and particularly her perhaps somewhat angular grace and pose remind one of Botticelli's Birth of Venus.’
H. Visser, ‘The soldier, the disco girl, the mother and the Polish Venus. Regarding the Photographs of Rineke Dijkstra’, in Rineke Dijkstra. Portraits, exh. cat., Jeu de Paume, Paris, and travelling; Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2004, p. 9
‘In 1990 Rineke Dijkstra had a bicycle accident that radically changed her life and the kind of work she made. [...] The first evidence of something new – the first picture of consequence she made after her accident – is a 1991 self-portrait that shows the artist in a bathing suit and cap in a shower after a gruelling, thirty-lap swim that was part of her rehabilitation program. Taken with a newly purchased 4 x 5 field camera (one that she still uses today), which has a relatively wide-angle lens, she looks into the camera, at us – and at herself – fiercely.’
S.S. Phillips, ‘Twenty Years of Looking at People’, in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, p. 18
All works: © Rineke Dijkstra