“At a moment when the portrait image dissipates itself in an economy of narcissism and fractal celebrity, Rineke Dijkstra reminds us of the photographic portrait’s public potential,” says Duncan Forbes, chair of the jury for the Hasselblad Award 2017, which has awarded the Dutch photographer the SEK1,000,000 prize [just over £90,000].
Born in 1959 in Sittard, The Netherlands, Dijkstra attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and first came to prominence in the 1990s, with a series of photographs of mothers and their children moments after birth, and with portraits of bullfighters just after leaving the ring. In the series Beach Portraits [1992-2002], she showed children by the sea in Europe and the USA, picking out youngsters on the cusp of adolescence.
Dijkstra is known for working on long-term projects, such as her series of images of Almerisa Sehric. First shooting Almerisa as a six-year-old asylum seeker recently fled Bosnia for The Netherlands [see lead image above], Dijkstra has continued returned to photograph her every few years, documenting her transition to teenager, young woman, and mother.
Dijkstra has also shot video portraits since the mid-1990s, most famously in clubs such as The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL (1996–97), and The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK (2009). Since 2014, she has filmed young Russian ballet dancers during their rehearsals.
The Hasselblad Foundation was established in 1979 and its Award is considered one of the most prestigious in photography. The prize is judged by a different jury each year, and the 2017 jury was made up of: Duncan Forbes (jury chair) curator and writer based in London and Los Angeles, and visiting research fellow at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London; Jennifer Blessing, senior curator of photography at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Simon Njami, curator and writer, Paris; Esther Ruelfs, head of the photography and new media department at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; and Mark Sealy, curator and director of Autograph ABP in London.
