RINEKE DIJKSTRA.

Known for her psychologically rich portraits, Rineke Dijkstra was photographing Bosnian refugee children at an asylum center in the Netherlands, where she encountered and photographed six-year-old Almerisa Sehric. Revisiting this photograph two years later, Dijkstra was struck by its power. She sought out Almerisa and her family, who were by then living in their own apartment. And so began a sustained portrait series, for which Dijkstra photographs Almerisa every two years. “What you see in this series is…how she develops from a child from a foreign country into a Dutch young woman,” describes Dijkstra. “The chair represents my life […],” says Almerisa, referring to the increasingly solid chairs in which she is seated in every picture. “When I came to the Netherlands it was…unstable like the plastic chair, and now I’m sitting on a wooden chair with more stability, with my feet on the ground and holding my first-born child.”

-MoMa 

Dijkstra concentrates on single portraits, and usually works in series, looking at groups such as adolescents, clubbers, and soldiers, from the Beach Portraits of 1992 and on, to the video installation Buzzclub/Mysteryworld (1996-1997), Tiergarten Series (1998-2000), Israeli soldiers (1999-2000), and the single-subject portraits in serial transition: Almerisa (1994-2005), Shany (2001-2003),Olivier (2000-2003), and Park Portraits (2005-2006).^[3] Her subjects are often shown standing, facing the camera, against a minimal background. This compositional style is perhaps most notable in her beach portraits, which generally feature one or more adolescents against a seascape.^[4] This style is again seen in her studies of women who have just given birth.

Dijkstra dates her artistic awakening to a 1991 self-portrait. Taken with a 4-by-5-inch camera after she had emerged from a swimming pool — therapy to recover from a bicycle accident — it presents her in a state of near-collapse.Commissioned by a Dutch newspaper to make photographs based on the notion of summertime, she then took photographs of adolescent bathers.^[6] This project resulted in Beach Portraits (1992–94), a series of full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine, and Croatia. The series brought her to international prominence after it was exhibited in 1997 in the annual show of new photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New YorK,.in 1999, the museum showed Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993, a color photograph of a teenage boy on a beach, next to Cézanne's Male Bather (1885-1887).

Dijkstra's works are held in numerous museum collections, including the Tate, London,;^[24] the Museum of Modern Art, New York.,^[25] the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Miami Art Museum; the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Gainesville; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo Cantonale d'Arte of Lugano; the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.; and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

-wikipedia