Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

Guggenheim Museum New York

June 29–October 8, 2012

Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Her large-scale color photographs of young, typically adolescent subjects 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. Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective brings together more than 70 photographs and five videos in a major mid-career survey, offering the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date.

Dijkstra has also photographed individuals repeatedly over the course of several months or years. Her ongoing Almerisa series began in 1994 with a single photograph of a young Bosnian girl at a Dutch refugee center for asylum-seekers, and has grown as Dijkstra continued to photograph her regularly for more than a decade, as she became a young woman with a child of her own. The outward signals of her transition into adulthood and her integration into mainstream Dutch culture reveal themselves incrementally over the course of many years. 

—Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography

More info at the Guggenheim website