Rineke Dijkstra: The Louisiana Book

This retrospective monograph gathers three decades of Rineke Dijkstra's portraiture into one chronological survey, built around a photographer known for catching people in the instant before they become someone else.

The book accompanies "The One and the Many," Dijkstra's first full museum survey in Scandinavia. It moves through her career in order. The Beach Portraits (1992–2012) show teenagers standing stiffly against sand and sea. Other sections cover new mothers photographed hours after giving birth, bullfighters still bloodied and shaking from the ring, and the Almerisa series, which follows a Bosnian refugee child into adulthood over more than a decade of sittings. Essays by Poul Erik Tøjner, Thomas Weski, and Hans den Hartog Jager, edited by Michael Juul Holm, trace her method: a large-format 4x5 camera and long exposures that Dijkstra has called "a space where things can happen" between photographer and subject.

Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands. She found the Beach Portraits while recovering from a cycling accident, when she began photographing herself and others in states of physical exhaustion. She is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery. In 2012 the Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted a full retrospective of her work, which traveled to SFMOMA and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. She received the Hasselblad Award in 2017, the year this book appeared.