Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits of Becoming

Rineke Dijkstra, born in 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands, is best known for her large-scale, unflinching portraits of people — often adolescents, soldiers, or new mothers — photographed at pivotal moments in their lives. With a minimalist approach and consistent visual style, she reveals deep emotional truths through posture, gaze, and presence.

Dijkstra began her career in commercial photography, but a personal injury and her recovery marked a turning point — deepening her interest in the body, transformation, and vulnerability.

Core Themes in Dijkstra’s Work

1. Adolescence and Identity Formation

Many of Dijkstra’s most iconic images feature teenagers, especially her famous Beach Portraits from the 1990s. These young subjects, photographed alone and often in swimsuits, stand in front of neutral natural backdrops. Their body language captures the uncertainty and vulnerability of becoming.

2. Ritual and Transformation

Dijkstra is drawn to moments of transition — whether it’s a bullfighter moments after combat or a mother seconds after childbirth. Her lens pauses at the threshold, capturing identity as it changes.

3. Documentary Aesthetic with Intimacy

Though influenced by documentary traditions, Dijkstra’s portraits have a softness and empathy. She often returns to subjects over months or years, building a narrative of transformation that feels honest and personal.

Notable Works

Beach Portraits (1992–1994)

This series captures adolescents from the U.S., Poland, and the U.K. standing solo on the beach. Despite minimal staging, these images radiate emotional intensity and presence.

Why it matters: The raw depiction of teenage vulnerability invites us to reflect on identity and change with tenderness.

Olivier (2000–2003)

A photographic study of a young man joining the French Foreign Legion. Dijkstra documents his transformation across multiple years — from fresh recruit to hardened soldier.

Why it matters: It examines masculinity, national service, and the psychological cost of institutional identity.

Tiergarten (1998–2000)

Girls photographed in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, each posed in natural light and open space. The contrast between their quiet presence and the history-laden setting adds poetic depth.

New Mothers (1994)

Women photographed immediately after childbirth — their bodies raw, faces flushed, and newborns cradled. It’s a rare and honest portrayal of one of life’s most dramatic moments.

Why it matters: Dijkstra reveals strength in vulnerability, offering visibility to an experience often hidden or idealized.

Why Rineke Dijkstra Matters

• She captures people in transitional states — emotionally unguarded and visually grounded.
• She brings dignity to vulnerability, asking us to slow down and truly see her subjects.
• She challenges the conventions of portraiture — using silence, stillness, and sincerity as her language.

Dijkstra’s portraits remind us that identity is not fixed. Her work is a meditation on becoming — powerful in its quietude, radical in its honesty.

Cindy Sherman: The Shape-Shifter Behind the Lens

Cindy Sherman, born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, is best known for turning the camera on herself — not to reveal, but to question identity, femininity, and the performative nature of representation.

She doesn’t create self-portraits in the traditional sense; instead, she transforms into characters that reflect (and often mock) cultural stereotypes, mass media tropes, and societal ideals.

Educated at Buffalo State College, Sherman began experimenting with photography in the late 1970s. Her breakout series, the Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), quickly became iconic and remains one of the most important contributions to feminist art and postmodern photography.

Key Themes in Sherman’s Work

1. Gender as Performance

Through wigs, makeup, costumes, and poses, Sherman embodies a range of female archetypes — from ingénues to socialites to grotesque parodies — revealing how identity is constructed and coded.

2. Media and the Male Gaze

Her early work mimics film stills, TV shows, and fashion shoots, subverting the ways women are traditionally depicted in media. By taking on these roles herself, Sherman reveals how limiting and often absurd these representations can be.

3. The Grotesque and the Abject

In her later work, Sherman leans into discomfort — distorting her face with prosthetics, creating aging or monstrous characters, and exploring decay, vanity, and mortality.

4. Identity and Artifice

At the core of Sherman’s work is a question: What is real? Every image is a construction — every identity, a costume. She exposes the thin line between authenticity and performance in both art and life.

Notable Works

Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980)

A series of 69 black-and-white photographs where Sherman poses as various female characters drawn from 1950s and ’60s cinema. None are actual film stills, but they feel eerily familiar.

Why it matters: Sherman takes control of the gaze by being both subject and director, flipping the dynamic of who gets to look — and be looked at.

Centerfolds (1981)

This series mimics men’s magazine centerfolds, showing women in horizontal, emotionally vulnerable poses. But instead of sexual availability, these women seem anxious or introspective.

Why it matters: Sherman critiques the objectification of women by making the viewer uncomfortable with their own gaze.

History Portraits (1988–1990)

In this series, Sherman mimics Renaissance and Baroque portraiture, donning elaborate costumes and prosthetics to parody “great art” and beauty ideals.

Why it matters: She uses historical parody to question cultural reverence and the construction of power.

Why Cindy Sherman Matters

• She dissolves the line between subject and artist — reinventing herself in every image but revealing nothing stable or "true" about identity.
• She critiques beauty and media norms by exaggerating them until they become absurd.
• She pioneered selfie-as-art long before Instagram made self-representation ubiquitous — but hers always come with sharp cultural commentary.

Sherman’s genius is her refusal to be pinned down. She forces viewers to question what they see and how they interpret others — and themselves.

Carrie Mae Weems: Reclaiming the Frame

When I visited the Modern Women/Modern Vision exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, one name stopped me in my tracks: Carrie Mae Weems. Standing before her work, I wasn’t just looking at photographs — I was being asked to look at history, at power, at myself. Weems doesn’t just take pictures; she rewrites narratives.

Born in 1953 in Portland, Oregon, Weems emerged as a leading voice in American photography during the 1980s. Her art blends the personal and the political, often using her own body as a stand-in for the stories of many — especially those of Black women. Through staged photography, text, and performance, she invites us to question what we see and what we’ve been taught to believe.

The Power of the Kitchen Table

One of Weems’ most celebrated works, The Kitchen Table Series (1990), is deceptively simple: a woman (Weems herself) sits at a kitchen table across a series of images that span romance, motherhood, solitude, and self-reflection. The series captures intimate moments, yet it speaks to a broader story — one that centers the experience of a woman whose life often goes undocumented in the history of art.

Here, the kitchen table becomes more than a domestic backdrop. It’s a stage for thought, for argument, for love. It’s where identity is wrestled with and reshaped. In Weems’ hands, this everyday setting becomes radical.

Looking Back to Move Forward

In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996), Weems confronts the brutal legacy of photography itself. Using archival images of enslaved Africans and African Americans — once used to justify racism — she overlays each with red filters and poetic, damning text. What was once scientific “evidence” of racial hierarchy is recontextualized into a cry for dignity and recognition.

Weems doesn’t just show us what happened; she forces us to feel the weight of what’s been lost, what’s been stolen, and what still needs to be reckoned with.

A Figure at the Museum Door

In her more recent Museums Series, Weems stands, cloaked in black, outside iconic art institutions — the Louvre, the British Museum, and others. Alone, looking in, she becomes a kind of silent question: Who is allowed inside? Who decides what art matters? Her presence is quiet, but it disrupts centuries of exclusion.

Why Carrie Mae Weems Matters

Weems' work is meaningful because it reclaims the camera as a tool of empowerment, especially for those who've been marginalized by its gaze. She challenges us to confront the stories we’ve inherited — and to imagine new ones. Her photographs are beautiful, yes, but their beauty is purposeful: it draws us in, only to shake us awake.

Through her lens, Weems shows that photography isn’t just about capturing a moment. It’s about challenging a history — and creating space for new futures.

📸 Want to Dive Deeper?

If you ever have the chance to see her work in person, do it. But even a visit to her official website offers a window into one of the most important artistic voices of our time.