250mc Research – Rineke Dijkstra | Taren Bilkhu Photography

Rineke Dijkstra is a Dutch photographer based in Amsterdam. She concentrates on photographing single portraits within a series usually based around a category or a specific set of people. She has looked at groups of people such as soldiers, adolescents, clubbers, and also people on the beach, creating a typology/theme with this. Her subjects are standing in the centre of the image and facing towards the camera, with a full length portrait taken of them against a minimal background, which seems to be her compositional style. I found that I had subconsciously taken my portraits in this style, remembering and channelling her compositional style from her work which I have seen much of over the last year. I found that I took a few different shots and angles of my subjects, but I chose to stick to a full length portrait, showing the backgrounds also. It also reflected to me almost the street-style fashion portraits too which have become increasingly popular on blogs and social media, and now the wider media. I felt like I had started to bring another aspect into my portraits, beginning from a simple black and white documentary image, to now a more modern street portrait. Whilst I liked this style and the produced images, my lecturer Caroline had previously advised me to be more aware of the backgrounds as so not to distract from the portraits. I went back through my photographs and realised she was correct, and that some of my portraits seemed to have some distractions or unnecessary space in the image. The compositional style of the subject linked to Dijkstra, but the minimal background was missing, which I realise is one thing which helps make her subject stand out in her portrait, whereas with mine, sometimes the background could just be a bit distracting away from my subject.

In terms of exhibiting, I found a Rineke Dijkstra exhibition photograph from the Saatchi Gallery, which was displayed in a similar way to how I would like to display my photographs in an exhibition. I would like them to be fairly large prints, so the portraits can be fully appreciated and taken in by the audience, not so much life size, but large. I think it would be quite a minimalist/traditional set-up, quite like this one shown, leaving the portraits to be centre of attention.