Wo Men (Hasselblad Award 2017)

216 pages, 26 x 36.2 cm, softcover, Walther Koenig (Cologne)

This large-format volume, designed by Irma Boom in close collaboration with Rineke Dijkstra (born 1959), focuses on the female figure in the photographer’s work – women and girls who have stopped somewhere (in a park, a beach, at a party), whom she captures in such a way that they appear present to an astonishing degree.

Spanning three decades of work, the book unites images from her classic series, including both photo- and video portraits, and extracts them from chronological order to suggest fresh ways of looking at her work. The book is published for Dijkstra’s 2017 Hasselblad Award, for which occasion the Hasselblad Foundation described her images as “recalling the visual acuity of 17th-century Dutch portraiture.”

Essays discuss Dijkstra’s gift for communicating an empathy with her subjects, and the logic of her image layouts in book form.