through their self-conscious concentration on the
camera/photographer. They share in the feelings of
vulnerability that accompany such exposure. A
photograph made at Hilton Head Island, South
Carolina in 1992, depicts a young American in a
peach-colored bikini. Her hair is long, blonde, and
streaked. Her plump body is smoothly tanned. Her
eyes are a deep blue. Everything is how it should be
and, yet, her brow is furrowed as if the effort of
looking perfect, or the worry of not, takes the plea-
sure out of life.
It is the tension between self-consciousness and
inadvertent self-exposure that characterizes all
Dijkstra’s portraits: whether they are still photo-
graphs or (derived from) videos. Comparisons
are often made between Dijkstra’s practice and
that of Diane Arbus. In an interview with Jessica
Morgan (2001), and paraphrasing Arbus’s fam-
ous statement, Dijkstra claims that she works in
‘‘the gap between intention and effect.’’ In fact,
Dijkstra’s photographic practice acts as a text-
book demonstration of Roland Barthes’ descrip-
tion of photographic portraiture in Camera
Lucida (1982). He refers to four competing
‘‘image-repertoires’’ that ‘‘intersect,’’ ‘‘oppose,’’
and ‘‘distort’’ each other: the person the subject
thinks she or he is, the person the subject wants
others to think she or he is, the person the photo-
grapher thinks the subject is, the person the
photographer wants to make use of in his or her
art. Each of Dijkstra’s portraits is borne out of
this intersection of expectations and desire. The
significance of this observation is that it refutes a
criticism that has been leveled at her portraiture:
that her photographs exploit people’s powerless-
ness. On the contrary, what Barthes’ point, and
Dijkstra’s images, reveal is the necessary recipro-
city of the gaze in the posed portrait. Photogra-
pher and subject confront each other, and it need
not be antagonistic or disempowering. Dijkstra’s
portraits are insightful and empathetic. Hers is
not a brutal stare, but a penetrating one. Unlike
Thomas Ruff’s photographs of young people,
which deliberately emphasize surface details
over psychological states, Dijkstra tries to get
‘‘beneath the skin’’ of her subjects.
A regularly cited influence on Dijkstra’s practice
is the German photographer August Sander. Like
Sander, Dijkstra photographs types. In addition to
the adolescents inBeaches, she has photographed
bullfighters, new mothers, school children, disco-
goers, and soldiers. In doing so, she sets up a
further tension: that of the relationship between
the general (category) and the specific (individual).
Take, for example, herNew Mothers, begun in
the 1990s. The young women in Dikjstra’s portraits
share a look of bemused wonder. They hold their
babies protectively against their naked bodies. They
behave in comparable ways. And, yet, the series of
full-length photographs clearly marks each wo-
man’s individuality: different body shapes, different
facial characteristics, different hairstyles. It is worth
noting, here, that in stark contrast to the de-sexua-
lized, idealized nude of western painting, Dijkstra’s
women are uncompromisingly corporeal. InTecla,
Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 16, 1994, a trickle of
fresh, red blood runs down the women’s left leg. In
Saskia, Harderwijk, Netherlands, March 16, 1994,
the woman’s caesarean scar is painfully apparent.
The mothers’ commonality and dissimilarity are
emphasized formally by the locations in which
they pose. Though each place is similar in terms of
its neutrality (a plain wall and an uncarpeted floor),
the details vary noticeably: wood, linoleum, tiles, an
electrical socket, a light switch, the cropped edge of
a doorframe.
As withNew Mothers, Dijkstra’s four head-and-
shoulder portraits of bullfighters (1994) insist upon
the comparative and contrasting signifiers of the
individual within a category. Photographed imme-
diately after a fight, with ripped clothes, bruised
bodies, and blood-splattered faces, the matadors
exhibit an intensity of emotion akin to the young
women with babies: a mixture of bewilderment and
self-containment.
In 1995, Dijkstra began making video-recordings
at clubs in and around Amsterdam, and sometimes
in collaboration with Gerald van der Kaap.Buzz
Club/Mysteryworld (1996–1997) contrasts two
venues, a disco in Liverpool, England, and a
techno-club in Zandaam, Netherlands. Dijkstra
recorded the adolescents against a white back-
ground, in a storage cupboard, from where the
music was still audible. The effect was to isolate
the teenagers from the chaos and noise of the dance
floor, without totally altering their mood. Her sub-
jects smoke, drink, and kiss. They move their
bodies to the music and play up to the camera.
The video, which lasts 26 minutes and is played
on two screens, juxtaposes the venues and the
types of young people who attend them. Deliber-
ately selecting adolescents who conform to peer
groups, Dijkstra demonstrates national and gen-
dere stereotypes, while encouraging her subjects
to differentiate themselves from the crowd. In
another video piece, Annemiek(1997), a young
blonde teenager with braces on her teeth, mouths
along to a pop song. The video plays on a loop.DIJKSTRA, RINEKE