Rineke Dijkstra: I See a Woman Crying
VAULT talks to contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra about capturing an authentic gesture and the legacy of Picasso.
Image credit: Installation view Rineke Dijkstra, I See a Woman Crying, 2009, three channel video- installation, with sound, 12 minutes, looped. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Rineke, it’s lovely to talk to you. Your work explores portraiture, most often looking at adolescents and young people at a specific turning point in their lives. What is your fascination with that time in a young person’s life? What is it you’re looking to capture?
A lot of my work is about people in some state of transition – mothers just after giving birth; preadolescent bathers on various beaches in the United States and Eastern Europe; club kids just off the dance floor in the UK and the Netherlands; teenage soldiers in Israel; an ongoing series of photographs of a young refugee from Bosnia who has to adopt a culture that is not her own.
In my first series, Beach Portraits (1992–2002), I was mainly interested in capturing people in natural poses, the kind they don’t have to think about. During the process of making the series, I discovered that children and adolescents still lack a certain kind of inhibition. They don’t have manners yet; they are still discovering everything. They are in a state of transition, in a state of being ‘flux’. Precisely in that hesitation, and in the idea that things are not fixed yet, I saw a beauty that has disappeared from adults.
In terms of capturing those individuals, is it an easy process? How much do you control the image that you’re taking?
I try to capture what I observe. I work with a large 4x5 inch analogue plate camera on a tripod, where you can only take one shot at a time. It is a rather slow process of observing and making contact with the subject. Not everyone immediately stands in such a way that ...Subscribe to read this article in full
