Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959)

Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra creates large-scale, psychologically rich portraits of people in states of transition. The series titled Tiergarten Berlin portrays two figures on the grounds of the Tiergarten Park in Berlin. Kora, Tiergarten, Berlin, July 1, 2000 and Kora, Tiergarten, Berlin August 10, 2003, exquisitely capture one girl’s personal and physical developments - from child to adolescent. Displayed beside each other the transformation in the figure is highlighted all the more. Standing against a dense background of trees, a child wearing cheerful yellow shorts is placed beside a taller girl in a blue flowery skirt. They look out with a mixture of shyness and curiosity: on the left, a frowning blonde girl faces the photographer directly with assertive confidence, while on the right, the same girl, three years later, stares at the viewer with an inquisitive look. By focusing intently on her subjects and almost entirely excluding background details, Dijkstra emphasizes the individual, capturing visual signs that illuminate subtle psychological and emotional states. The Tiergarten Berlin series was exhibited in the Rineke Dijkstra’s major retrospectives at San Francisco's MoMA and at the Guggenheim in New York in 2012.