Rineke Dijkstra

"When I make a family portrait, I sometimes think of the novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde. In that book, the young Dorian Gray makes a wish that he will always remain the way he looks in his portrait. His wish is granted: the real Dorian Gray literally stops aging. Instead, his portrait grows older over time. While Dorian remains the same, the portrait slowly transforms from an attractive young man into a hideous old monster. The portrait takes over the work of changing. But that doesn't make Dorian happy. I think of that book because I am very well aware that the families I portray will go on living with their portraits. Every day, they will see how I depicted them, how they were frozen at a more or less random point in a past that recedes further and further away. Meanwhile, the family has continued to evolve. The differences are barely visible from day to day, and it's the unchanging portrait that makes them conscious of all these changes. The portrait becomes a kind of baseline, a lasting reminder that time goes by and you don't have to fight it. Change is the heart of life, and that's exactly what Dorian Gray forgot.” – Rineke Dijkstra, March 2020

In the main ground floor gallery, the exhibition features eight photographs from Dijkstra’s “Family Portraits” series, which started in 2012 as an ongoing commission project and has since evolved to include families selected by the artist.

Taken within the intimacy of a family home or garden, only one generation of a family is photographed, with neither parents nor grandparents pictured. Comprising portraits of children within their domestic environs, this newer series by Dijkstra develops her longstanding interest in the journey from childhood to adulthood.

For this exhibition, Dijkstra photographed two families living in London, producing Alessandro and Sofia, London, February 9, 2020 and Arden and Miran, London, February 16, 2020.

The children’s names suggest the diversity of London, an international city. Indeed, Alessandro and Sofia are son and daughter of an Italian father and British Sierra Leonean mother, and Arden and Miran are sons of Kurdish parents. More importantly, the settings of the photographs are the children’s homes. In the short time since these photographs were taken, we are now more conscious than ever that one’s home is an intimate and unique space, separated from the world outside. It is in our homes that we take refuge, but equally cultivate our interests, carve out our emotional spaces, and build lives which are uniquely ours.

Employing a wide-format, tripod-based photographic film camera – an analogue technology used in photographic family portraiture for over a century – Dijkstra directs the children to pose with no particular facial expression, to be natural in front of the camera, while being aware that a portrait is being made. Taken in their own spaces and habitats, the resulting images carry both a vulnerability and an assuredness. Dijkstra carefully curates the settings, allowing certain details like pot plants or favorite socks to create nuanced symbolism, reminding us of our own childhood idiosyncrasies and allowing a story to evolve. Two brothers sit together on the same chair, their styles of dress and hair clearly marking their individual personalities and different stages in life.

The youth of Dijkstra’s sitters is often juxtaposed with the formality of their position in spaces defined by the tastes of parents and older family. In Albertine and Andras, Untersiemau, Germany, August 23, 2016, we wonder how these young, barefoot siblings might mature and develop as they sit between different influences and pulses of time: a baroque-style velvet sofa, a classical architectural column, and a contemporary artwork. Their barefoot freedom contrasts with the attired formality of The Grandchildren of Denise Saul, New York, October 15, 2012. Seen together, the works bear witness to two very different forms of imaging, which is less to do with Dijkstra than with the family members outside the frame of the picture.

In Sophie and Alice, Savolinna, Finland, August 3, 2013, two young women look out to meet the lens of Dijkstra’s camera directly. Centered within the frame, one holds a contrapposto stance, traditional to the work of the Italian Old Masters, which can be seen in many of Dijkstra’s portraits; the other sits in a more relaxed manner, with arms on knees. While both are clearly aware they are being photographed, they maintain a neutral expression. Dijkstra has highlighted both the lack of overt intervention and the intensity of gaze that characterizes her approach: “I hardly give any directions and I demand a concentration that is decisive for the photographs.” She is interested in capturing people at moments when their poses have occurred naturally and unconsciously.

As such, Dijkstra’s work recalls an ethnographic style of portraiture reminiscent of photographers working in the 1960s. Yet the luminosity of Dijkstra’s use of color – for example, the dappled light seeping through the tree canopy – enhances the objectivity of this typically cold documentary style of portraiture and recalls the warmth of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. This complex combination of influences on Dijkstra’s approach to portraiture is striking. The inkjet print also has an imposing scale at over fifty inches tall, with the standing figure occupying much of the frame.

The minimal setting contrasts with the specificity of the location disclosed in the artwork’s title: the photograph was taken near the family’s vacation home in Savolinna, a town in the southeast lakeland area of Finland, on August 3, 2013. The sisters are caught in a specific moment in their unfolding personal histories. The wooded steps, upon which they stand or sit, recede into the shadows of the tree canopy to suggest they are poised to journey into adulthood. As a double portrait, the dominating subject is the familial relationship between the sisters, who share a strong resemblance and whose intersecting paths will be both similar and different. Characteristic of Dijkstra’s penetratingly psychological approach to portraiture, the relationship between the pair is also held in play with the relationship between subject and photographer, subject, and viewer.

Outside their homes, the personalities of Dijkstra’s subjects are imbued with the characteristics of the various parks in which she finds them: stage-like, constructed environs that have the nature and form of painterly pastoral settings, or the fairytale associations of the forest. An artist invited into a home has a wholly different relationship with her subjects than a stranger in a park, and it takes a certain type of personality to procure Dijkstra’s attention, then hold their own in this context.

Dijkstra’s use of flash, even in daylight, illuminates subtle details and expressions within the shadows of the trees. Her use of color recalls the warmth and spatial interplay of seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish painting. In El Parque del Retiro, Madrid, 2006, a young girl stops skipping for just long enough to engage directly with the camera and has all of the presence of a latter-day Las Meninas, recalling the masterpiece that is only a short distance away in the Museo Nacional del Prado.