Collection: Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra (born 1959, Sittard, Netherlands) is a Dutch photographer and video artist whose practice centres on portraiture, identity and the relationship between the individual and social or institutional structures. Working primarily in large-format photography and multi-channel video, Dijkstra has developed a body of work that observes people at moments of transition, effort, vulnerability and self-presentation — on beaches, in clubs, in hospitals, in training rooms and on stages.

Her early beach portraits, begun in 1992, established her international reputation: frontal, large-scale photographs of adolescents standing at the water’s edge, their bodies caught between self-consciousness and exposure. The same quality of sustained, non-judgmental attention characterises her video work, in which extended duration allows small shifts in expression, posture and concentration to become visible. Works such as The Gymschool, St Petersburg (2014) and Marianna (The Fairy Doll) (2014), commissioned for Manifesta 10, observe young dancers and gymnasts in training — recording the gap between the roles assigned to them and the expressions that escape those roles.

Dijkstra has exhibited internationally at major institutions including MoMA, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. She has been represented by Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris since the early 2000s. Exhibition invitations, handouts and printed matter produced in connection with her practice document one of the most sustained and formally rigorous careers in contemporary photography.