I've been checking out another photographer recommended by my tutor - Rineke Dijkstra. She is a Dutch artist (b. 1959) whose striking portrait subjects tend to be young adolescents, young adults, young mums etc. Originally a commercial photographer who took portraits of successful businessmen,she began to look for more natural poses. In the early 1990s this led to a focus on children and young people on a number of beaches in the US, Poland, England, the Ukraine and Croatia. I found many of these in an excellent collection called 'Portraits' * :
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| Rineke Dijkstra: Odessa, Ukraine August 4, 1993 |
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| Rineke Dijkstra: Kolobraze,Poland July 26 1992 |
Many of her portraits are totally opposite to her commercial world where the portrait is
designed to present an image of the sitter, presumably the image that the sitter wishes to be conveyed. Her beach portraits are not posed. The resulting image in the words of Hripsime Visser* comes not just from the fact that she has chosen adolescents who have yet to fix on what they perceive to be their image but ' as much from the choice of the photographic moment'. In his introduction to 'Portraits' Visser continues :
'That moment is the result of little direction, of watching and waiting combined with the slow, laborious technique of a 4 x 5 camera on a tripod, with a fill-in flash also on a tripod , limit contrasts and shadows'. ( Visser, 2004,p.11)
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| Rineke Dijkstra: Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 13,1996 |
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| Rineke Dijkstra: Jalta,Ukraine,July 30, 1993 |
The stances are often confrontational in that the subjects look directly at you, the background very simple so as not to compete. I think that the vulnerability you can sense here comes from the pose not the almost bland expression. In the left image the pose suggests a sense of bravado but what does it hide?
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| Rineke Dijkstra:Montemor-O-Novo,Portugal,May1,1994 |
Looking at other work such as the toreador above taken after a bullfight, she captures a real sense of vulnerability. It comes from the position of the body and head but more so from the expression or perhaps, more accurately, the eyes...they look out but do not see ..an image of someone having survived a struggle or fight to the death underlined by the faint bloodstains on his shirt and face.
Dijkstra visited this sense of 'passage' in her portraits of young male Israeli conscripts after their first military exercise...somehow capturing this transforming experience in her images of young men, each standing alone in their battledress against a simple countryside backdrop.
However, I was drawn more to the series of images below of Olivier (The French Foreign Legion).
Reading these images top left to right, then bottom left to right taken between 2000 and 2002, you can sense a change has happened - a transformation from youth to more experienced, hardened soldier. It comes less from the pose or the clothing but from the eyes, the expression captured.
Looking at Dijkstra's work makes me reflect on how I approached my first stab at portraiture. Natural poses are hard to achieve..I can see that there is a particular moment which could be described as the telling moment which if you can capture produces 'pure gold'. Certainly you need to think a lot harder about what it is that you're trying to capture in the portrait and this may not necessarily agree with your subject's idea of the end result. Who calls the tune here? I like her approach re backgrounds - the simpler and plainer the better, unless of course, you need some additional factor to help describe the 'character or image ' being sought through the shot.
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| My great grandfather |
'Rineke Dijkstra's photographs differ from the representational 19th century portrait which contains attributes that are alien to the subject and belong to the studio, attributes which suggest a general bourgeois ambiance independent of the person being photographed.
Reneka Dijkstra's figures are simply 'there'.
( Stanel, 2004 p.148 )
*Dijkstra,Rineke. (2004) Portraits Amsterdam: Schirmer/Mosel Production
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