Rineke Dijkstra. Beach Portraits.

One person, one beach

On 24 June 1992, on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, Rineke Dijkstra photographed a teenager in a swimsuit standing alone on the sand. A month later, on 26 July 1992, she photographed another teenager in Kołobrzeg, a seaside town in Poland. Both belong to the Beach Portraits, begun that summer.

Over the following years Dijkstra went to beaches in Poland, Croatia, Ukraine, Belgium, England and the United States. In each place she did the same thing: asked a teenager to stand before the camera, back to the sea, and photographed the whole figure.

The structure barely changes. The sitter stands in the centre. Behind are three horizontal bands: sand, water, sky. Nothing else. The pictures are printed large in colour, many about 117 by 94 centimetres, big enough that the viewer stands before the image as before a person.

A body that does not yet know how to stand

The first thing one notices is the awkwardness. These teenagers do not know where to put their hands. A foot turns inward. A shoulder rises slightly. A hand clutches at fabric. They are in adolescence, when the body changes faster than one can get used to it.

Dijkstra does not wait for them to relax. She neither catches a natural moment nor builds a flattering pose. She lets them stand and waits for the point when self awareness is most visible. Their eyes meet the lens, guarded and curious at once.

The camera sits slightly low. Small bodies against the sky take on a monumental presence. That contrast is the strength of the series: an ordinary young person, visibly unsure, suddenly seen with the gravity of a classical portrait.

No private story

Dijkstra's backgrounds are always neutral. She has explained that if you show too much of a sitter's private life, the viewer immediately starts making assumptions. Sea and sky are a shared ground, much the same in Poland or America.

This lets small differences come forward. The cut of a swimsuit. The colour of a tan. A way of doing the hair. The viewer begins to compare, not to classify, but to see that beneath the differences the unease is shared. A teenager in Kołobrzeg and one in Hilton Head stand before the camera with the same unspoken question: how do I look.

The approach runs through Dijkstra's whole career. She photographed mothers minutes after giving birth, bullfighters just after the fight, and followed a young Bosnian refugee, Almerisa, for years in the Netherlands. Always one person, at a moment of passage, looking straight at the camera.

Why these pictures still stand

In 2012 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organised a Rineke Dijkstra retrospective, with some 70 photographs and five video works. The Beach Portraits were at its heart and remain the series most tied to her name.

The frontal portrait, sitter facing the camera with nothing to shelter behind, is a strong tradition in photography. Diane Arbus also photographed people face on, but often sought those at the edges of society. Dijkstra chose the most ordinary young people in the most ordinary place: a summer beach.

That ordinariness is what makes the pictures hard to forget. Everyone has stood like that at some age, not knowing what to do with their hands. Beach Portraits keeps a moment most of us have forgotten.