Rineke Dijkstra

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Rineke Dijkstra (2011)

Rineke Dijkstra (born June 2, 1959 in Sittard , Netherlands ) is a Dutch photographer . She became known in the mid-1990s for her large-format portraits of children and young people.

Life

Rineke Dijkstra studied from 1981 to 1986 in Amsterdam at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy . She then worked as a freelance photographer for fashion magazines such as Elle , Avenue or Elegance , but also photographed entrepreneurs and business people for a business magazine . She struggled with the self-portrayal of the portrayed, who already had a lot of photo experience, and was looking for career alternatives in the artistic field.

At that time, Dijkstra got into a car accident with her bicycle, was seriously injured and was unable to work for several months. To avoid surgery on her hip, she started swimming every day, taking portraits of herself in the indoor pool. As a result of this series, in which Dijkstra exposed her own insecurity and vulnerability, Dijkstra began a phase of intensive work on portraits of people on the beach. After she discarded the first series of portraits of her friends, because they posed very self-confidently, she finally found a person in a 13-year-old who met her wishes for naturalness. From 1992 to 2002 she photographed children and young people in swimwear on the beach in the USA and Europe. It was with these beach portraits that Dijkstra experienced her breakthrough in the mid-1990s.

In 1994 she created the series New Mothers , nude photographs of young mothers, some immediately after birth, and another series of photographs of bullfighters, bloodstained immediately after the fight. In the same year she also started the long-term project Almerisa , in which she accompanied Almerisa, a six-year-old girl who had fled Bosnia to the Netherlands, over 14 years in her adjustment to her new life and her maturation into an adult woman, in the last of the Almerisa holds her newborn child in eleven pictures. She began a conceptually similar project in 2000 with the Olivier - Legion Etrangere , in which she documents over three years and in seven portraits the change of the initially seventeen-year-old Olivier da Silva as a volunteer in the Légion étrangère from an "innocent boy to a fighting machine" .

Two years earlier she portrayed teenage dancers from a Liverpool club in The Buzz Club. She followed up on this series of photos in short video films in the conceptually very similar series The Krazyhouse .

plant

Dijkstra lives and works in Amsterdam . She first exhibited her works in the Netherlands in 1984, and from the mid-1990s also internationally. Dijkstra quickly became known internationally for her consistent work on individual projects.

Dijkstra works in large formats , she uses a 4 ″ × 5 ″ large format camera with a normal lens and tripod for her photographs, and has also been working with video since the mid-1990s. Usually, the portrayed are shown centered in a frontal view and with the portrayed looking directly into the camera. In her photographs, she removes the portrayed from their surroundings and places them against reduced or even neutral backgrounds. This visual isolation makes the representations stronger, so "they become like icons, like symbols of themselves". Dijkstra describes herself as authenticity-oriented in her work, she says of herself: "I wait for the unprotected moment, the situation in which someone forgets his pose and the true nature of a person reveals itself."

While Roxana Marcoci feels reminded of Dutch portrait painters such as Jan Vermeer in view of Dijkstra's portraits , Dijkstra himself cites Diane Arbus and Judith Joy Ross as influences .

Exhibitions (selection)

Awards (selection)

Books (selection)

  • Images of man. Exhibition catalog. Museum Folkwang Essen, 1998.
  • The Buzzclub. Exhibition catalog. Liverpool 1998.
  • Rineke Dijkstra. Ostfildern 2001.
  • Portraits. Exhibition catalog. Munich 2004.
  • Susanne Gaensheimer (Ed.): Rineke Dijkstra: The Krazy House. Exhibition catalog. Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-00-040526-6 .

proof

  1. ↑ a b c d e Boris Friedewald : Masters of Light - Great Women Photographers from Two Centuries. , 2014, ISBN 978-3-7913-4673-1 , pp. 58-59
  2. ↑ a b c Roxana Marcoci: MoMA | What's in a portrait? Rineke Dijkstra's Almerisa , accessed December 21, 2014
  3. ↑ a b art-magazin.de: Rineke Dijkstra - Interview - "It's always about knowledge" - Art - art-magazin.de ( Memento from December 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) , accessed on December 21, 2014
  4. ↑ Rineke Dijkstra on artnet

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Dijkstra, Rineke
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch photographer
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Sittard , Netherlands