Stuck in the Middle with Park Portraits

Walking into the Marian Goodman Gallery, one is met by the stares of multiple schoolchildren and teenagers pausing from play or resting after school in city parks. The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, in her newest series of photographs titled Park Portraits, has once again managed to magnificently capture the transitional period of life within the faces and eyes of her adolescent subjects. The exhibit, running until Feb. 17, is the first time Dijkstra's Park Portraits has been displayed in the United States.

For those familiar with Dijkstra's work, the backgrounds of the photographs displayed here are quite unlike those of her previous portraits. Rather than position her subjects on isolated beaches or in front of white walls, these portraits are set against a backdrop of city parks in the United States, Europe, and China which Jason Oddy, writing about Dijkstra's Park Portraits in Modern Painter magazine, describes as "almost Edenic surroundings." By photographing adolescents in their last moments of youth, Dijkstra is commenting on the idyllic nature of this fleeting part of life. Some photographs even feature backpacks, candy wrappers, and other colorful paraphernalia of youth scattered around the subjects-quite the contrast to Dijkstra's earlier, starker portraits. Although this choice of background is significantly less minimalist than in her previous work, the complexity of adolescence which Dijkstra is known for capturing is still conveyed.

Between April and August 2005, Dijkstra traveled to various parks and asked adolescents to pause, disrupting their conversation or ball game, to look at the camera. The effect is that the subjects of her portraits are at the same time both natural and unnatural in their surroundings. Although already at play or in conversation, the youth had to briefly and unnaturally stop their activities for the portraits. This method of portraiture not only uniquely blurs the line between being natural and posing, but perhaps more importantly motivates the intense and yet also deceptively uninterested gazes which Dijkstra captures so consistently.

Although all of the portraits displayed here are compelling and moving, some do stand out among the others. A small girl dressed as an angel stands in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, gazing almost sheepishly at the camera, revealing scraped knees and spots of dirt on what was once a pristine outfit. Another young girl stands erect on a scooter in Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona, the bulge of her belly emerging from under her tank top. A teenage girl in a small red dress sits in Vondelpark in Amsterdam, clutching her untied Converse shoe in one hand, unknowingly displaying a bit of underwear between her slightly spread, pale legs. While some of these subjects gaze absent-mindedly at the camera, others seem to stare the viewer down.

Oddy's commentary on Dijkstra's Park Portraits notes that the intensity of her subjects' gazes commands the viewer to return them. Thus, although the exhibit contains only 13 photographs, the visitor may find it difficult to leave before having engaged in a silent conversation with each of Dijkstra's subjects.