Rineke Dijkstra

Dutch Photographer Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, the Netherlands and worked as a professional portrait photographer until the 1990s, when she began incorporating her own artistic style into portraiture. One of her first major series, Beaches (1992–1996), comprised portraits of adolescents in bathing suits and expanded her audience internationally. Dijkstra uses a wide array of models for her photographs, including club-goers, school children, soldiers, and young mothers with their newborn babies. 

Her large-scale colour photographs recall 17th-century Dutch painting in their scale and visual acuity. The minimal contextual details present in her photographs and videos encourage us to focus on the exchange between photographer and subject and the relationship between viewer and viewed.

These unadorned depictions often appear simultaneously revealing and enigmatic and she has been compared to August Sander and Diane Arbus,Her work has been displayed at venues around the world, including at the 1997 and 2001 Venice Biennales.