Customer Reviews

Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits

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This series of portraits is very plain in many ways, but contains some striking images. The cover photo is an example - it took me a moment to realize that the model had just come back from wading.

Other pictures have that same double-take effect, including a mother and child series of nudes. Each is a full-length, frontal (almost confrontational) view of the woman holding her new baby, just a few hours old. Baby cuteness takes some time to develop, more time than these children have had in the world. The mothers haven't had time to recover, either, still stretched but no longer filled. They hardly match either conventional beauty or the romanticized vision of motherhood. That line of blood down the inside of one woman's leg isn't very romantic at all. It's just very true. This series of photos, more than any other I can think of, keeps me coming back to look again, and to see the pictures a little differently each time.

Many of the photos in this collection did very little for me. That's probably a good thing. If the whole set had the density if its most demanding images, it would have created its own gravitational field.

//wiredweird

This afternoon I saw an exhibition of 30-40 of Rineke Dijkstra's portraits at the Stedlijk museum in Amsterdam, and I was very affected by it. The photos seem so simple and innocuous at first glance, but it only takes a second to find what Barthes called a "punctum" (a subjectively conspicuous detail that takes you out of the frame into some, mostly likely ineffable and personal, truth of life, and establishes a direct connection between you and the subject in the photograph) in each one. Most often it is found in the subtlest of details in Dijkstra's photos, or between the photos as montage effect surfaces while moving through one of her series. Innocence and gritty reality seem to engage in a dialectic relationship throughout these works.
"Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits" contains an excellent sampling of Dijkstra work. If only it was 2, 3, or 4 times the size! but then, I suppose, it would be much to expensive for a student like me. In actual fact, the photos in this book are certainly large enough to be appreciated.

This book is a must have to reference a comprehensive collection of Rineke Dijkstra's work. The plates are 9"x12" with excellent color reproductions and the write-ups go beyond the regurgitated art critic articles.

I really enjoyed this book. I felt as if I were at a small gallery the first time I looked through it. The quality as well as the content are amazing.

Great book, great paper quality, great image quality. A good corpus of Dijkstra's work

Great selection, beautiful reproductions, but one small disappointment: even though the Amazon Editorial Review promises that "Portraits includes the photographer's new Ballet School series" I've only found one photo from that series (I might have overlooked some because the book is not ordered completely chronologically).

this ended up being a great holiday gift. good condition. I'm very happy with the purchase.