silent witness Rineke Dykstra on how to take a photo Jason Oddy Dijkstra

Transcription

1 Dijkstra silent 0 0 witness Rineke Dykstra on how to take a photo Jason Oddy VONDELPARK On a sunny and unseasonably hot Sunday afternoon, Vondelpark - Amsterdam's principal green space - is teeming. Tourists vie with locals, and pedestrians with cyclists, for the last bit of October sunshine. 'For fuck's sake! What are you doing?' an English teenager screams as her inability to master Dutch brakes causes her to crash into another bicycle. 'Can't you fucking see I'm out of control?' I cycle swiftly past, towards the cafd where I'm meeting the woman who is arguably Holland's best-known living artist, Rineke Dijkstra. When I arrive it seems that half the park is there too. After a few minutes of scanning faces, I see her pedalling coolly through the throng. 'Shall we go somewhere else?' she says. 'Somewhere a bit less crazy.' We leave the park, pausing at another caf6 en route to her studio. By the time we reach the functional, airy atelier on the upper floor of a former hospital, it is already filled with autumnal evening light. PORTRAIT I had wanted to take her picture at the end of the interview, but we decide to proceed straight away before the day disappears altogether. My camera, a big, black, heavy metal affair with a plate-glass viewfinder, just happens to be the exact same type with which she makes her sumptuous portraits. And when we find out that we use identical film as well, I start wondering what the consequences of these coincidences might be. A bit of me is tempted to try and do a Dijkstra on Dijkstra, to find an unobtrusive background and concentrate totally on her as subject. But, apart from a non-descript patch of bare wall, her workspace doesn't really lend itself to this approach. With the light fading, I opt for the traditional 'artist in studio' picture. I'm just about to take the first shot when she asks, surprised, 'Don't you use a loupe?' 'No', I shrug, never having done so before. 'Won't the pictures be out of focus?' she continues. MODERN PAINTERS 87

2 Above Jalta, Ukraine,uJuy30, 1993 IMAGE COURTESY STEDELIJK MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM COURTESY MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK AND GALERIE MAX HETZLER, BERLIN Facingpage Olivier, June 18, 2001 IMAGE COURTESY STEDELIJK MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. COURTESY GALERIE JAN MOT, BRUSSELS AND MARIAN GOODMAN, NEW YORK Previous page Vondelpark, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,June 10,2005 COURTESY MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK AND GALERIE MAX HETZLER. BERLIN 'I tried without a loupe once and none of them were sharp. Let me see if I can find mine.' She can't and I have to continue loupeless, and even though I know she is just being helpful, I feel a little chastened for deviating from the Dijkstra standard. THE UNATTENDED MOMENT 'When I left art school I started working on commission. I was photographing the boards of directors of big Dutch companies, and I found it really difficult to get behind the mask. I had to make these portraits at nine in the morning and I'd only have five minutes. I never found a way of making them more natural. It was only when I'd change my films that they'd relax. And I thought I'd like to photograph them like that. Much later, when I was working on my own projects, my own subjects, I discovered that there are these unattended moments when people are not really aware that they are posing. And somehow this is much more interesting than when people strike a pose. I began wondering how a portrait would look if you weren't thinking about it, and whether in this sort of unconscious state you get a sense of something more real. So I started by making a self-portrait that I got my assistant to take at the swimming pool. After 30 laps I walked to the shower and stood there. I made the picture just at that moment when you are too tired to pose.' think ofaworkby Rineke Dijkstra and you will probably think of a teenager standing, back to the sea, on a beach YOUTH Think of a work by Rineke Dijkstra and you will probably think of a teenager standing, back to the sea, on a beach. The power of her celebrated beach pictures derives from the juxtaposition of their classical composition and the raw, sometimes gawky appearance of their subjects. Wearing no more than their swimsuits, the young bathers stand alone before the camera, vulnerable and open to our slow scrutiny. Nothing in the scene distracts us from taking in every least detail of these figures - a tensely clenched fist, an uncertain look, a chin that juts out with just a little too much self-assurance. If these adolescents are supported by the ground and their heads are framed by the sky, then water is the middle element. Forever in motion, it corresponds to the welling, still changing part of Dijkstra's subjects as they pass from the boundless space of childhood to the more solid parameters of adult life. In other series she has turned her camera on Israeli teenagers before and after they begin their military service, on young, blooded Portuguese toreros, on teenagers in nightclubs in Liverpool and Holland, and on pubescent fairytale children in Berlin's Tiergarten. This fascination with youth is a driving force behind her work. 'With young people everything is much more on the surface - all the emotions,' she explains. 'When you get older you know how to hide things, but when you're young it's all very visible and also very new. Somehow every experience is a new experience and this has a very positive energy.' Even when her sitters try to put on a front, Dijkstra often manages to pinpoint something within. Olivier Silva, a new recruit to the French Foreign Legion whom she photographed seven times between 2000 and 2003, gives little away. But look closely and from picture to picture you see the light fade imperceptibly from his eyes, the hope disappear gradually from his lips. RECOGNITION 'I always liked to watch people, I was kind of an observer. I used to be pretty shy,' confides Dijkstra. Her quiet reticence persists, and makes me think of an observation the writer Joan Didion made about how her own awkward shyness often led people she met to divulge extraordinary things about themselves, just to fill in the silence. At her keenest, Dijkstra succeeds in opening up her subjects. An avowed admirer 88 MODERN PAINTERS

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5 Dijkstra Facing,page Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany,July 1, 2000 COLLECTION STEDELIJK MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. COURTESY STEDELIK MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM, MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK AND GALERIE MAX HETZLER, BERLIN Left Rineke Dijkstra in her studio, Amsterdam, 2005 PHOTO: JASON ODDY Below Self-portrait Marnixtad, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 19, 1991 COURTESY MAR AN GOODMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK AND GALERIE MAX HETZLER, BERLIN of Diane Arbus, she instinctively finds herself drawn to people who, perhaps like her, 'are a bit different from the mass, who stand on the outside a little'. If there is an initial empathic identification, then once she has her already receptive candidates in place, it is simply a question of waiting. 'When I make portraits of these people, I look at them, I observe them. But it's really a question of choosing the right moment. It has to do with a kind of recognition which doesn't really happen very consciously. It happens between them and me and it lasts just a fraction of a second.' VONDELPARK II For her latest and still ongoing body of work, now on view as part of her first solo show at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, Dijkstra spent the summer in Vondelpark. If, after years of travelling the world in search of her subjects, this series represents a kind of homecoming, it also marks a change in her visual language. Rather than employ the stripped-down backgrounds of her earlier work, she here positions her subjects in almost Edenic surroundings, with sunlight dappling a lake behind some trees. It is a move that both looks back to the tradition of landscape painting and which provides context and support for the sitters. In the strongest 'with young people everything is much more on the surface - all the emotions; when you get older you knowhowto hide things' picture, a comely adolescent couple sit in the shade of a tree, he retiringly behind her, she staring directly out, the intensity of her gaze commanding you to return it. In this serene and contemplative depiction of youthful ardour Dijkstra manages to distill all their subterranean fervour. 'I think in a good picture there is a kind of rest and harmony,' she says. 'As though they have been sitting there forever.' And as she speaks I understand that it is precisely her infectious calm that at times enables the young people she photographs to step out of the maelstrom of their everyday lives and enter into eternity. * Rineke Dijkstra is on view at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam until 6 February. An accompanying catalogue is published by Schirmer/Mosel MODERN PAINTERS 91

6 COPYRIGHT INFORMATION TITLE: Silent Witness SOURCE: Modern Painters F 2006 PAGE(S): WN: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: Copyright The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.