Citations Ed. 10 - Rineke Dijkstra

The beach has existed as a trope across the arts for centuries. As the border between land and water, the figure of the beach suggests the encounter with the unknown, the duality of growth and decay, and the limits of nature and culture. In the narrative arts, the beach may be used to set up the hope of serene leisure, only to be stained by the intrusion of a specific or vague threat such as a shark, or the onset of inclement weather. In visual media, it confronts the scale through which it is presented: No large-print format, no extended long take, can contain the immensity of the horizon line, the depths underwater invisible but sensed, when one stands at the breakwater.

It is no wonder that the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s (b. 1959) preoccupation with youth and adolescence found its arguably ultimate expression through her breakthrough 1990’s work Beach Portraits. A graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Dijkstra began her career as a commercial photographer, focusing mostly on portraits of corporate employees and associated imagery for internal end-of-year publications. An accident toward the end of the 1980s forced her to bed rest. Before a rehabilitation session in a swimming pool, Dijkstra spontaneously set up a camera at one end with a trigger, with which to photograph herself immediately upon emerging. The photograph, taken in a 4x5 lens, was instrumental in refocusing Dijkstra’s practice back to artistic methods. The image is the opposite of those she crafted for commercial clients. Exhausted and drained from physical exertion, she appears as if moments from fainting, between waking and the next state.

Since then, Dijkstra has continued to pursue taking portraits of subjects in states of various transition, be they teenaged Swiss volunteer legionnaires, new young mothers, or adolescents posing at beaches across the world. But such settings and subjects invite cliché and empty repetition. It is precisely Dijkstra’s method and photographic intuition that enables the negotiation of a limited visual language into an emotionally incisive and psychologically penetrative body of work.

Dijkstra almost exclusively works with 4 x 5 lenses because they are “closer to the angle of what your eyes see, and closer to your sense of what’s in and out of focus when you notice someone on the street or beach.” She shoots on tripod, and stations her flash on one behind her, painstakingly positioning the camera and light for her portraits. When they are printed in large format, the means by which she prefers, Dijkstra explains that “it’s not simply about size for its own sake, to make photos as big as paintings. … Working with 4 by 5’s, you can get all these details to show up when the prints are big.” The images of adolescents, then, are often enlarged to be twice or sometimes three times the subjects’ own heights. The modulation of scale, combined with a purposefully restrained aesthetic vocabulary, allows Dijkstra to comment on the tropes of the beach, of motherhood, of self-imposed volunteerism, with both affirmation and confrontation.

In Beach Portraits, a girl in a one-piece swimsuit poses as if stopped in her tracks, her left hand closed with a sense of apprehension and command, her face somewhere between bemused and aloof. Two young boys in briefs, their ankles and feet pale against their tanned legs, squint back into the camera as if it were the sun. The boy on the left bends his left knee reminiscent of an ancient statue, his hips slightly jutted forward. A young redheaded girl crosses her arms as she half-scowls, the white dots bright against the green of her skirt, all of her in unnatural flash against the dark water behind her. These images capture not the care-free glee of youth skipping along the shore, but the dissatisfaction that so often appears suddenly between runs, as if they comprehend all that is may not actually be.

Dijkstra’s work is characterized by the connection she develops between her and her subjects, their specific characters shown through a specific gesture. If it is a cliché to say that each one has its root in a universal truth, Dijkstra’s own undoing and confirmation of the cliche’s is the universality of the persistence of uncertainty. Though people may fear the unknown, they still wonder about it, imagine its possibilities, which often take them to new sites of vulnerability.