Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra is one of the leading contemporary Dutch photographers, born on June 2, 1959, in Sittard, Netherlands. She developed an interest in photography from a young age, beginning her studies in 1981 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she still lives and works today.

The subjects of her photographs emerge from beaches, hospital rooms, and undefined spaces, almost haunting us with their imperfect beauty and fierce necessity to exist. Through these often boldly heroic images, Rineke does not merely confirm that banality is real; she reveals the truth of fiction, the theatricality of psychological complexity.

Her series "Beach Portraits" consists of life-sized color photographs of young adolescents in swimsuits, captured on American and European beaches. This project gained her significant recognition, notably through a presentation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. One such photograph, featuring a child by the sea in Yalta, Ukraine, is part of the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection. "Her adolescents are isolated, with the ocean flowing behind them; each subject, posed frontally, participates in a cold and almost scientific categorization reminiscent of the works of August Sander and Thomas Ruff. Viewed as a whole, the complete series of 20 beach portraits creates a collective portrait of existential insecurity and the awkward beauty of youth."

Dijkstra herself states, "With young people, all emotions are much more on the surface; as we age, we learn how to hide things... in the end, it is the individual I seek."