Menschenbilder

Rineke Dijkstra
Menschenbilder

Photographs: Rineke Dijkstra & Ulf Erdmann Ziegler

Text: Ute Eskildsen

Publisher: Museum Folkwang

97 pages

Pictures: 39

Year: 1998

Comments: Softcover, 285 x 225 mm. First edition, 1998. Text in german. Minor edge wear with a small crease on the upper right corner. In very good condition.

Rineke Dijkstra might be the most important photographer of portraits alive today. She channels August Sander through her own poet-soul photographing youth with brutal, unyielding generosity. Her people emerge from beaches, hospital rooms, indefinable space, to haunt us with their imperfect beauty and their fierce necessity of existence. These photographs heroicize individuals in a brazen way. Dijkstra isn't content with confirming that banality is truth. She gives us the truth of fiction, the theatrics of the psychological complexity. She lets us way, way inside. The smudged blood on the collar of a bullfighter is in dialogue with the thin stream of blood running down a new mother's leg as she clutches her hours-old infant with an uncertainty that is astonishing. Features work from Dijkstra's major series to date.