Beach Portraits

Rineke Dijkstra
2010
English
La Salle Bank NA
Hardback edition
Dust jacket
72 pages

Photo book by Rineke Dijkstra with the famous photos from her series “Beach Portraits”. She has taken a series of photos of teenagers on beaches in Belgium, Croatia, America and Poland. She took teenagers out of their groups and often had them pose alone — sometimes in pairs or threes — in front of the camera in swimsuits.

What Dijkstra tries to capture in the beach portraits is, as she puts it, “the space between intention and effect.” People think they present themselves one way, but they can't help but present themselves another way. It's impossible to have everything under control. But when I try to photograph someone, especially the whole body, they're always like, "Oh, what should I do with my hands, etc?" And I think, looking back, I kind of used that in the beach shots.

Photographer Rineke Dijkstra was born on June 2, 1959 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. She attended the Rietveld Academie from 1981 to 1986 in Amsterdam and started off her career as a commercial photographer. She started gaining traction after her series “Beach Portraits” (1992–94) was presented at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1997. Her very first solo exhibition was in 1984 at de Moor Amsterdam. She has been featured in the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 2001, at the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1998, and has been commissioned by the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam. From 2005 to 2006, the traveling exhibition “Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits” was on view at several museums including Jeu de Paume, Paris and MACBA, Barcelona. She has had retrospectives under her name at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2012. She is represented by Marian Goodman in New York and Paris, Galerie Jan Mot in Brussels, and Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin.