Rineke Dijkstra

In the photographs that make up her second New York solo gallery exhibition, Rineke Dijkstra keeps her eye trained on innocence as it gives way to experience. She brings us into proximity with two youthful subjects whom she has photographed periodically: Shany, a teenager newly drafted into the Israeli military (who would later desert); and Olivier, who signed up with the French foreign legion several years ago, as soon as he was old enough to do so.

Dijkstra first shot Shany, as she did many other young women, at the induction center in Tel Hashomer, Israel—not the sort of location, the photographer has commented to me, that afforded her the luxury of getting to know her subjects. But the pandemonium of place is completely absent from the four-foot-high C-prints—no sense of urgency or tumult finds its way into the frame. If anything, the subject’s disaffected waifishness and military garb qualify as the high-fashion look of the moment. As a result, Shany is oddly neither here nor there—she’s not really a model, she’s not exactly a soldier. She is, however, right at home within the continuum of Dijkstra’s desire to arrest youth, to distill and study it so that perhaps we might know it as we never could when we were in between things ourselves.

Dijkstra has photographed Olivier since 2000, each time gaining access to him through the French foreign legion, a fighting force ranked among the toughest and most highly trained in the world. How long would it take Olivier to grow into manhood once he joined up? How does this process manifest itself visually? Dijkstra took his picture at least once a year, recording the passage of time on his face and body, waiting for the soldier to emerge. Olivier appears to play it very close to the chest; and yet from one year to the next he continues to participate in Dijkstra’s project. He gives no indication he’s interested in revealing himself to her (or us)—but that’s key to the payoff of the photographer’s pictures. Her subjects reveal themselves to us in ways they could never anticipate.

Dijkstra’s “continuous subjects”—those with whom she has kept in touch and documented growing up—also include a Bosnian refugee named Almerisa, who’s grown from a folkish girl from a wartorn country to a generic global citizen. (Photographs of Almerisa are on view in “Strangers,” the International Center of Photography’s first triennial.) In each instance—whether it be Shany, Olivier, or Almerisa—we’re drawn into memories of our own familial experiences. (You see your brother’s kids once a year and are struck not only by how much they’ve grown but by how dramatically visible those changes are.) Over time, with Dijkstra’s repeated invitations to her subjects to step before her camera, virtual intimacies begin to accrue. For viewers, this has to do with the vulnerability of her young subjects and with the artist, whose pictures always make us inquire beyond the frame. We imagine her ability to take us into military offices and induction centers and facilities for refugees—and that leads us right back to the invisible quotient of place in these pictures. As a result, however momentarily, we are led to consider the fragility of youth against the backdrop of the wars we wage against one another.

—Jan Avgikos