Rineke Dijkstra Dutch, b. 1959
Rineke Dijkstra photographs people at moments of change: adolescents on beaches, new mothers, soldiers, and bullfighters after leaving the ring. Her large color portraits give close attention to posture, expression, and the effort of facing a camera. In photographs and video, small gestures reveal the distance between how people present themselves and what they disclose.
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Vendas Novas, Portugal, 21-05-2000, 2000
Born 1959, Sittard, Netherlands; lives in Amsterdam.
Rineke Dijkstra studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam. She worked as a freelance photographer throughout the 1980s taking formal portraits for an array of magazines and newspapers.
In 1990, Dijkstra was in a bike accident that left her badly injured. The artist went on to photograph her rehabilitation process, describing the photos as her first "truthful" portraits. The self-portrait series marked her transition into large-format color portraiture and a new conceptual direction for her art.
In 1992, Dijkstra began photographing her series entitled Beaches. The portraits depict adolescents against beach settings. This series completed her break from traditional photography.
She has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, London, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, to name a few.