Photographs courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and ParisRineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, with portraits here from Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland and Ukraine, as well as New York and South Carolina. More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: July 5, 2012
Rineke Dijkstra has enormous faith in the power of two things: youth and the camera. In her best work this 53-year-old Dutch artist uses photography and sometimes video to coax out the emotional subtleties and raw energy that are special to children, adolescents and young adults, with grave, revelatory and sometimes ecstatic results.
At other times her portraits are more opaque, which can yield another kind of magnetism: We see pictures of resistance to photography in which Ms. Dijkstra’s subjects hold on to their secrets, showing us a more armored youthful vulnerability.
Both kinds of images can be found in Ms. Dijkstra’s richly affecting 20-year midcareer survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Organized jointly with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and overseen by the curators Sandra S. Phillips of that museum and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim — it brings together more than 70 color photographs and 5 video works. They create an engrossing meditation on the anxieties, pride and tumult of youth and the emergence of the self, and also on the degree to which the camera can capture these rites of passage.
Ms. Dijkstra studied photography at art school in Amsterdam and spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports — activity that left her frustrated. She felt that her subjects remained hidden behind social and professional masks and habits of self-presentation, while she sought a greater emotional intensity.
A serious injury gave Ms. Dijkstra needed time to think: five months in bed followed by physical therapy that culminated in swimming. One day in June 1991, toward the end of her recovery, she photographed herself immediately after swimming a grueling 30 laps. She thought that fatigue would lend the photograph an emotional immediacy. It did.
That self-portrait, which shows the artist in a dripping bathing suit, looking winded and slightly bowed but staring defiantly at the camera, is in the show. Drawing from traditional portraiture and postmodern setup photography, it signals the beginning of Ms. Dijkstra’s work as an artist, in particular her tendency to photograph the young, who are less practiced at self-presentation.
Echoing the swimming pool image, she began photographing teenagers in similar moments of physical exposure, in swimsuits on the beach. She then sought out situations of genuine stress or momentous change, as in her large head shots of young Portuguese toreros just after emerging from the bullring, their faces bloodied and garments torn, their eyes glowing with triumph and relief; or her full-length photographs of dazed young mothers standing naked with their newborns in their arms, like no-frills, modern-day Madonnas.
Ms. Dijkstra is member of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all Germans. But it is often said, and it is true, that her work is less glamorous and more human and frankly expressive than theirs.
Moreover, Ms. Dijkstra uses photography in a way that few of her contemporaries do: as a kind of pivot between portrait painting and reality — that is, between completely hand-formed and therefore fictive pictures of real people and real people themselves. Her photographs adopt some formal aspects of painting, but their subjects are also much more present and unmediated in realistic detail and emotional mood.
The pivoting nature of Ms. Dijkstra’s images is clear in the first gallery of the Guggenheim show, which is distributed somewhat awkwardly through four of the museum’s tower galleries adjoining the rotunda. It begins with an imposing selection of the beach portraits (1992-94) that established Ms. Dijkstra’s reputation: the full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine and Croatia.
The monumental isolation of the figures is enhanced by low-angle shots, along with frontal poses and the austere, slightly abstract background bands of beach, water and sky, all of which echo the full-length portraits of Goya, Hals and Manet. This sense of form and formality contrasts markedly with the pictures’ contemporary casualness — the exposed flesh and intimations of fun and sun — even as it is confirmed by the prevailing seriousness and subtle anticipatory anxiety.
Some subjects, like a Ukrainian youth in a red Speedo-type swimsuit, are rawboned and angular; they have not grown into their bodies. A tall, lanky girl on a Polish beach has full hips but a flat chest; her pale green bathing suit is wet only up to the waist, suggesting the upward progress of puberty. A more mature blond girl in a silky orange two-piece in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has mustered makeup, jewelry and an elaborate hairdo worthy of a local teenage beauty contest.
Speaking about the beach portraits in an interview, Ms. Dijkstra hit the nail on the head when she said, “They showed what we don’t want to show anymore but still feel.” Looking at these pictures, we understand that the emotional vulnerability of youth is not so much outgrown as hidden.
Time, change and the lack of change are among Ms. Dijkstra’s themes, which she often emphasizes by photographing the same person over time. In a series of seven half-length portraits shot over three years, we track the maturation of a teenager named Olivier, starting with two images from July 21, 2000, the day he joins the French Foreign Legion, has his head shaved and dons fatigues. Over the next five images, as he appears in uniforms or sweaty T-shirts, his expression remains amazingly, almost frighteningly, constant and, in a way, young, even as he hardens and fills out, progressing from boy to man.
A fuller transformation is revealed in the same gallery by a series of 11 images taken between 1994 and 2008 that follow a young Bosnian refugee named Almerisa into adolescence and beyond, to motherhood. Always shown seated in a chair, Almerisa becomes tall and gangly, then womanly and, according to some writers, more assimilated.
More transfixing, however, are the subtle and not so subtle changes in her face and, it seems, her attitude. As she tries out different makeup and hair colors, her visage gains a palpable brittleness, becoming slightly common. In the final image she is shown with her infant; corny as it may sound, her face has regained some of the softness apparent in the first images from her childhood.
In Ms. Dijkstra’s videos the passage of time is, as might be expected, even more present, but in remarkably different ways. At one end of the spectrum is the near motionless quiet of “Ruth Drawing Picasso,” a wonderful six-minute portrait that may be as close to still photography as video can get but is much more revealing.
It shows a young schoolgirl seated on the floor of the Tate Liverpool completely absorbed in copying a Picasso painting (that is never shown) into her sketchbook. In her subtle shiftings of gaze, expression and position, Ruth comes across as an immensely likable, self-sufficient child whose existence brightens your view of the future.
In contrast to Ruth’s stillness is the sometimes ecstatic energy found in Ms. Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in dance clubs: a two-channel projection from 1996-97, “Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL,” and the four-channel installation “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK,” from 2009.
In both Ms. Dijkstra once more presents her subjects in formally controlled circumstances, against white seamless backgrounds and shot mostly at three-quarter length. In “Buzz Club” the subjects mostly hang out: They smoke, chew gum and drink beer (often simultaneously) while swaying to the music and largely ignoring the camera. But one young woman in a white dress that reveals her midriff is an exception; as the music’s beat becomes irresistible, she locks eyes with the camera and dances her heart out, to riveting effect.
Her generous performance may have inspired the “Krazyhouse” video, for which Ms. Dijkstra invited selected clubgoers to dance before her camera to their favorite music. Again, their performances vary greatly in generosity or, put another way, in the degree to which the music (and the camera) is resisted or surrendered to. But when they cut loose, as do Simon and Dee, it is hard not to be enthralled, and grateful to Ms. Dijkstra for capturing such powerful flashes of human potential.
“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” continues through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.
A version of this review appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Hiding In Plain Sight.
