Artist Highlight: Rineke Dijkstra

Beach Portraits, 1992

The work of Rineke Dijkstra, a Dutch artist who utilizes photography as a vehicle to create compelling portraits, has always fascinated me. When we think of portraits, generally a picture of a person looking at us, smiling, and seemingly happy comes to mind. Or perhaps, the generic grade school photos are more prominent. Whatever the case may be, having a picture taken of you always leads to a pose, smiling, and saying cheese. Dijkstra's photographs don't fit that description. In a way, they take a step further and show a true likeness of the individual she captures in her lens, rather than the facade that can be created by the 'cheese' effect. She typically chooses young adolescents or young adults as her subject matter, perhaps because they are the ones still constructing their identities, making the likeness all the more challenging to capture. And sometimes her choice of subject matter may be what what makes her photographs so enticing, moments in time with awkward youths, new mothers after birth, and intrusions in the park all give the viewer a feeling that they are an interloper into the private space of the subject.

Her most striking portraits were produced when she photographed women after having just given birth. Standing against a backdrop of stark white hospital walls, the viewer is presented with a new mother and her infant, still nude and not yet sure of the role that she has just taken on. A woman in a liminal space, one identity has been left behind and one is before her waiting to be donned. What strikes me the most is the contrast these photographs offer between what we all imagine those first moments between mother and child to be, and the reality of what they are. The surroundings that are utilized in all of Dijkstra's work emphasize the connection, or lack-thereof, of the subject with the photographer and the silent conversation between the two that may or may not be taking place. 

                              

To me, Dijkstra's portraits are all about the self, identity and the liminal space where they meet and are performed. We constantly are changing, whether in the roles we choose to play  or those that or forced upon us. And in a world where so much of who we are and how we depict that is created through our own choice, these photographs depict individuals at moments in time that seem private or unexpected, allowing the viewer to witness a sense of confrontational self-consciousness, if you will. 

So what do you think? Do her photographs allow for insights never seen before? Do they make you uncomfortable? Do you consider her photographs portraits?