Over the past ten years, Rineke Dijkstra has based her practice on the scrutiny and portraiture of teenagers on beaches in Eastern Europe and North America, young mothers with their newborn babies, Portuguese matadors, French foreign legionnaires, adolescent Bosnian refugees, and Israeli soldiers, among others. Formally, all her portraits share a frontality reminiscent of August Sander’s systematic typology of the social strata of the Weimar Republic. What distinguishes Dijkstra’s work is a human touch—her models, her objects, always remain subjects who agree to be part of a conversation with both the photographer and the camera. Her images never fail to picture a tension that reveals self-confident, unsettled, dazed, unsteady identities. She focuses on specific qualities—the curve of a neck, the twist of an ankle, a drop of blood, a bead of sweat, the concealment of a shoulder. This emphasis, along with her ability to capture the historical moment in the details of the portrait, places her closer to traditions of classical painting than of straight photography.

The Buzz Club, Liverpool, England/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, Netherlands (1996–1997), Dijkstra’s first video work, was shot at two European dance clubs. She recorded clubgoers in a makeshift studio adjacent to the main dance floor. Complaisance is absent; empathy is there instead. Isolated from the group and edited from the signifiers of their world, her subjects confront or avoid the camera’s gaze, sway to the beat, blow smoke rings, stare, or suddenly let loose with frenetic dancing. Everything—the clothing, the hairdos, the body language, the jewelry, the attitudes, the music—participates in carving out a mesmerizing gap of time and space in the world of teenagers struggling to define their identity. They are pulled in the uncanny tension between childhood and adulthood, individuality and uniformity, strength and vulnerability.