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"           Vondelpark (2005). Rineke Dijkstra leans in over her soft-boiled egg on toast at an Upper West Side diner and gestures toward a plump, middle-aged customer hunched over the counter. &amp;quot;I can stare at people,&amp;quot; she confesses. &amp;quot;That man over there, the way he&amp;#039;s sitting, the way he moves\u2026.&amp;quot; That Dijkstra is an inveterate people-watcher should come as no surprise. The Dutch photographer is renowned for her sensitive, intimate, but unsentimental portraits, among them a series of mothers immediately after giving birth, teens being inducted into the Israeli army, and Portuguese bullfighters fresh from the ring, a little dazed and bloodied. For her 2009 video Ruth Drawing Picasso, Dijkstra simply trained the camera on an English schoolgirl as she sat on the floor, intently sketching a portrait of Dora Maar at the Tate Liverpool. Even the day before, at the Guggenheim Museum, Dijkstra found herself wondering why she was more focused on the other visitors than on the exhibition she&amp;#039;d come to see. &amp;quot;I thought, Of course, standing against a white wall, they become works of art themselves,&amp;quot; she says. Indeed, Dijkstra&amp;#039;s subjects, shot with an old-school 4 x 5 view camera, often appear sculptural, frozen midmoment against a plain background. Dijkstra has remained somewhat under the radar in the U.S., but her first major American retrospective is now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will travel to New York&amp;#039;s Guggenheim in June. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s not a flashy person, and her work is subtle, not obvious,&amp;quot; says Sandra S. Phillips, SFMOMA&amp;#039;s senior curator of photography, &amp;quot;but I think profound.&amp;quot;          Dijkstra at work in Ko\u0142obrzeg, Poland (1992). Dijkstra arrived at her life&amp;#039;s pursuit despite some parental opposition. Though her mother was a devoted amateur painter, her father, an engineer and head of sales for an electronics company, considered art school impractical and packed her off to teacher&amp;#039;s college. &amp;quot;I hated it,&amp;quot; she recalls. Then, she says, &amp;quot;I met a guy who was a photographer.&amp;quot; So began an affair\u2014short-lived with the guy, but lifelong with the art of photography. &amp;quot;It was about looking,&amp;quot; says the dark-eyed Dijkstra, who wears her brown hair long and straight. &amp;quot;To see things in different ways.&amp;quot; She bought her own camera and toted it everywhere. &amp;quot;You saw the world through a frame. Photography, anyway, is about isolating, taking things out of context.&amp;quot; At a teacher&amp;#039;s suggestion, Dijkstra&amp;#039;s early imitations of her boyfriend&amp;#039;s abstractions soon gave way to photographing people. &amp;quot;He saw that it was aesthetic bullshit, what I was doing,&amp;quot; she says with a laugh. For some of her first attempts, she shot unsuspecting people from behind. Then she turned her lens on the young and intriguingly arrayed clientele of the Amsterdam club Paradiso. That&amp;#039;s when she came across American photographer Diane Arbus&amp;#039; haunting images of outsiders and outcasts. &amp;quot;I recognized myself in [her work],&amp;quot; Dijkstra says. &amp;quot;She photographed people she was attracted to. It was a personal thing. Her photos are not mean. She likes these people. You can see that. She admires them.&amp;quot;          From left: A 1992 photograph from &amp;quot;Beach Portraits&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Israeli Soldiers&amp;quot; series: Shany (2002), Shany (2003). Editorial assignments were the only professional avenue available, but Dijkstra soon tired of shooting self-conscious business executives. About five years in, she broke her hip in a bike accident and was laid up for months. &amp;quot;In a way it was a very good thing,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It gave me a chance to look at myself and look at my work.&amp;quot; While still recovering, she made a self-portrait in a swimsuit after a tough physical therapy session. Then, on vacation in South Carolina, she took photographs of teenagers on the beach. At first glance, the shots are simple: Set against the ocean&amp;#039;s horizon, the subjects, some still with baby fat, others gangly from growth spurts, stand in the sand, their gaze directed at the camera. But the sharply detailed images are deceptively compelling, intimately capturing the children on the cusp of adulthood and drawing the viewer closer. Dijkstra liked what she saw and took the concept to beaches in Poland and Ukraine. The &amp;quot;Beach Portraits&amp;quot; of the early &amp;#039;90s\u2014which also succeeded in delineating the era&amp;#039;s stark contrasts in fashion between West and East\u2014propelled her onto the international contemporary art stage. She followed with mothers, bullfighters, soldiers\u2014all subjects just after or before life-threatening experiences, all evoking a jumble of sometimes conflicting emotions\u2014as well as children she came across in Berlin&amp;#039;s Tiergarten park. In &amp;quot;Almerisa,&amp;quot; a project spanning 14 years, Dijkstra photographed a young Bosnian refugee&amp;#039;s gradual assimilation to Holland. In the last photograph, taken in 2008, Almerisa has a baby of her own. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s 24 now,&amp;quot; Dijkstra says incredulously. &amp;quot;She really became family.&amp;quot; There are plenty of artists who rely on their friends as muses and models, but rather charmingly, Dijkstra uses her art to form connections with strangers. Erin, who was 14 when Dijkstra shot her in a fluorescent orange bikini in South Carolina and is now in her early thirties, recently spent a week as Dijkstra&amp;#039;s houseguest in Amsterdam, where the photographer made a new portrait for the retrospective. Dijkstra has also been rephotographing the babies, now teenagers, who appeared with their mothers in the postnatal portraits. Though Dijkstra is herself now 52, her subjects have remained youthful. &amp;quot;What I like about young people is the potential is there but not developed yet,&amp;quot; she explains. &amp;quot;In a way, they&amp;#039;re sort of abstract.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s often compared to other Euro\u00ADpean photographers of her generation, such as Germans Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, though Dijkstra sees herself firmly in the reality-centric tradition of Dutch portrait artists, from Rembrandt to Vermeer. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m really interested in photographing common people,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s in my genes.&amp;quot; While Dijkstra says she has not seriously considered making anything other than a portrait in more than 25 years, she is acutely aware of the genre&amp;#039;s limitations: &amp;quot;You cannot capture someone in one-fifth of a second,&amp;quot; she admits. She also grasps that the real subject of her work is not just the person she sees through the viewfinder. &amp;quot;Photographs tell a lot about people, but also about the photographer,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a representation of somebody, and of me.&amp;quot; Photos: courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels; \u00A9 Rineke Dijkstra (left, middle); courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels; \u00A9 Rineke Dijkstra (right) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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