The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Philip, Nicky Dee), Liverpool, UK, 2009
In the film, five teenage clubbers take turns dancing alone in front of a white background, while a techno song of their choosing plays in the background. When Dee, a pretty black girl wearing jeans and a beige t-shirt begins to dance to David Guetta’s When Love Takes Over, we witness a magical transformation. At first, she tentatively moves her arms back and forth, her eyes communicating the uncomfortable self-awareness of adolescence. But then—she lets herself go. With confidence and euphoria, she dances and lip-synchs to the techno track, relishing the opportunity to be whatever she wants for the camera.
This is one of the video installations that was featured in Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s retrospective at the Guggenheim. It included two moments that Dijkstra frequently investigates in her work: the exposure of the shy, vulnerable self and the performance of a confident identity. In her seventy photographs and three video installations that spanned four floors of the Guggenheim this summer, the contradictions between these two were often dissolved.
For the past twenty years, Dijkstra has used her camera to investigate the construction of identity. This exploration has led her to an eclectic set of subjects, from teenagers at the beach to soldiers in the Israeli Defense Force. The result is a rich collection of photographs and videos studying both the fragility and resilience of identity.
It is unsurprising that teenagers hold special allure for Dijkstra: their identities are continually made and unmade as they struggle to style themselves. This state of potentiality and vulnerability makes them the perfect subject for Dijkstra’s study, and she captures them in their attempts to confidently present themselves to the camera and to the world. At the same time, however, Dijkstra exposes the self-consciousness that characterizes adolescence. For example, her swimsuit clad youths in the “Beach Portraits” series stand with a monumental presence and defiant faces against a soft ocean landscape, yet their body language gives their shyness or bodily discomfort away. Without sexualizing their bodies, she also shows the beauty in the physical transformation adolescents undergo. In her photograph Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 13, 1996, for example, a tanned boy stands affectless on a rocky beach, trying to present a manly demeanor. His body, which only sports a black speedo, is still that of a child, and his face looks so young that his effort to be a man in front of the camera is almost silly. Yet his torso and thighs glisten with moisture, creating the elusion of well-defined muscles. This evokes the man he will soon become, turning his awkward pose into a defiant embrace of the contradictions inherent in the transitions he is undergoing.
Dijkstra also finds rawness and vulnerability in people who are physically exhausted, such as mothers who have given birth, or matadors who have just left the bullfighting ring. Like the teenagers, their identity is in a precarious state, their exhaustion undermining their ability to pose. In this sense, these pictures are the converse of her photos of teenagers, which capture the making of identity. While the bloodied faces and jackets of the bullfighters remind us of the masculine violence and courage that defines their identity as bullfighters, their tired faces are softened and reveal their fragility as human beings. A similar series features the three naked mothers who have just given birth, and look fatigued and afraid. The hint of roundness in their bellies evokes the image of a saintly pregnant woman, and the way in which they clutch their babies to their chest is evidence of the maternal protective instinct. Yet they have just undergone a monumental change, from being pregnant to being a mother, and the photographs primarily confront us with their fear and exhaustion—rarely associated with the image of motherhood.
During the last week of Dijkstra’s exhibition, a Yale professor of art history named Carol Armstrong gave a lecture at the Guggenheim titled “The Portrait in Contemporary Photography.” A portrait, Armstrong argued, should register the irreducible particularities of a living human presence. Photography is particularly suited to this task, because the camera’s ability to capture an enormous richness of detail makes the subject identical only to himself. However, Armstrong warned us against committing what she called the expressive fallacy—the assumption that a photographic portrait will tell us something about the thoughts, emotions, and moral character of its subject. The camera constructs the individual’s subjecthood, and all that we see is what the photographer and sitter decide to let us see. Even photographers, like Dijkstra, who are looking to expose something deeply human in average people, are also using the camera to create rather than record a subject.
In other words, although Dijkstra searches for subjects who are less likely to strike a pose, that hardly means that there is no performance in her photographs. In fact, what she exposes in her subjects is the vulnerability and self-consciousness that accompanies any confident creation and performance of identity. Dijkstra uses her camera to register all the tiny details that create someone’s personhood, and the visual acuity and neutral backgrounds that are characteristic of her portraits demand careful attention. In photographing people who are in a state of transition, she brings her viewers face-to-face with something universal—the fragility of the identities that we move in and out of and the tenacity with which we go through this movement. For this reason, her retrospective imparts us with optimism, something important but rare for an art exhibit.