Let's Dance

Abstract

One of the hottest tickets in San Francisco during the 2012 Society for Photographic Education (SPE) national conference was Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and SFMOMA the mid-career retrospective featured Dijkstra's photographic and video works produced since 1992. Filling several galleries of SFMOMA's third floor, the space felt tight for the size of the work although this feeling may have been enhanced by the large number of viewers in the galleries perhaps overloaded by a sold-out SPE conference Ed. note: See Afterimage 39. no. 6 (May/June 2012) for a report on the 2012 SPE conference. Missing from the gallery were some niceties that have accompanied Dijkstra's work in other locations such as beanbag chairs for video viewing which can add a sense of play fulness to connter the artist's straightforward and spare photographic style. During her 2012 SPE keynote, Memory Serves, Sally Mann insisted that all portraits are exploitations because the photographer controls the representation of the subject. While this may be true of Mann's own work. the portraits Dijkstra makes often bid more like offerings to the viewer. Dijkstra's approach is one of collaboration, and as an imagemaker she errs or the side of empathy rather than exploitation. What discomfort or embarrassment the images may create are a byproduct of the agony of youth and its insistence on forging identity using any means necessary. but primarily through the twin totems of music and style. Like August Sander. who approached his subjects with respect tint their individuality, Dijkstra chooses to offer her subjects' vulnerabilities to the viewer without criticism or manipulation. Her work embodies Roland Barthes's theory of the punclum, in which the viewer is effectively pricked by the undeniable and often personal aspect of a photographic image. Dijkstra's first project, Beach Portraits (1992-96). provides simple gestures such as a bent knee, a slouchy swimsuit or a Band-Aid over a belly button to prick the viewer. Most importantly, it is the insistent gaze of the subjects that says to the viewer: I give you permission to look. This is generosity, not exploitation. Large and set high on the wall, these beach portraits are more closely linked to altarpieces (the Ghent Altarpiece comes to mind). Teenaged Adams and Eves, their levels of self-consciousness are heavy or light in relation to I heir cultural upbringing. These straightforward images, employing fill Hash mixed with available light. express the cumplicated nature of growing up. The works that followed in the exhibition coninued to explore themes of transformation and identity. Although dabbling slightly in issues of trauma. as represented in her 1991 series Bullfighters and New Mothers, Dijkstra is clearly most interested in child-to-adult transformation, in particular as manifest in the rituals of teenage life. Her willingness to return to her subjects year after year gives her credibility as a recorder of substance. as with the series (1994) of Bosnian refugee first photographed by Dijkstra as a voting child, and (2000-03) photographed (luring his career with the French Foreign Legion. These two powerful series remind the viewer of the vital role of time within photographic practice. If Barthes, in mourning his deceased n tot her, wrote of photography as capturing little deaths, Dijkstra instead uses the camera as a time machine. The transformation of Almerisa from child to adult is stretched before the viewer in eleven photographs: she is simultaneously no more and ever more. at once present and gone. It is this ability of photography to record the moment even as it vanishes that Barthes found to be a brilliant and painful paradox. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1994, Dijkstra began working in Liverpool with a group of teens who frequented a local dance club. …