Rineke Dijkstra's Teenage Portraits

Rineke Dijkstra MTV, Leonardo DiCaprio, Dawson's Creek, South Park, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Boyz II Men, gangsta rap, Razor scooters. Kiddie culture produced by adults for an astonishingly large child market, these and other pure products of America dominate national and global culture today. Fake, clumsy, estheticized reflections of teenage angst and joy, these ubiquitous portraits of adolescence have gained a new, overwhelming currency in the 1990s, especially in the adult world. But not every teen subject in art photography has suffered the same predictable fortune. The Southern Gothic photographer Sally Mann, for example, has skirted accusations of pornography by capturing misty, romanticized nudes of her own children. Photographer Chris Verene, following the well-trod path pioneered by Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, wades knee-deep in certain adults' prurient interests by photographing weekend photographers photographing teen girls.

Rineke Dijkstra, a Dutch photographer currently enjoying an enormously successful solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery in midtown, presents what are certainly the most compelling teenage portraits of all. Universal and highly personal at once, Dijkstra's pictures of transnational teens bridge geographic, sexual and generational boundaries, compassionately unmasking the vulnerability of the age, the literal and metaphorical rite of passage built into the common but tough experience of graduating from late childhood to incipient maturity.

Dijkstra's photographs may be familiar to some viewers despite this being her first New York show. Two color portraits (the first, a photograph of a skinny boy on a beach hung recently at the MOMA next to Cezanne's The Bather, the second, a picture of a spaced-out teen now at Marian Goodman that was also seen in the exhibition "Children of Berlin" at P.S. 1) have shown off her work to great advantage. Whether photographing teens in bathing suits against the sea or English schoolboys in natty uniforms, Dijkstra's symmetrical, straightforward, symmetrical compositions work hard to isolate poses, gestures and glances, all in order to portray the artist's individual subjects as everygirl or everyboy. Photographed flat, frontal and in full-figure, Dijkstra's teens bloom uncomfortably in their individuality, their physical attractiveness and defects awkwardly outstripping their developing sense of shame and self.

RINEKE DIJKSTRA , TIERGARTEN, BERLIN, JUNE 27, 1999, 1999 Working against traditional expectations of portraiture that demand that achievement, worth and social position be recorded, Dijkstra actively strives to reveal more than just her subjects' outward appearances. Mining the sitters' features for chinks in their soft shells, Dijkstra's latest photographs, the "Tiergarten" series, captures teens on the grounds of the Tiergarten park in Berlin and two other parks in Lithuania. Pictured alone against a dense background of trees or sparse grass, placed smack in the middle of the composition, Dijkstra's girls and boys face us like shy, insecure animals distilled from a much larger, raucous forest. Pushed forward by the photographs' strikingly dense detail and by Dijkstra's consistently shallow depth of space, the artist's subjects expose imperfections like baby fat, facial blemishes and overly muscular thighs alongside their undeniable, colt-like attractiveness.

One child, a pudgy little blonde girl, faces the photographer directly with bruiser-like, almost masculine confidence. Another, a pretty, older brunette with braces and mosquito bites peeking beneath her tanktop, stares off wide-mouthed into space with the look of a saint in a conversion painting. Confronted by Dijkstra's clunky, large-format camera and by their own half-innocent ungainliness, the artist's young subjects eventually drop their guard. Alert, rapt and fresh as if they had momentarily stepped out from life's current, their teenage transitions are captured by Dijkstra like a nature photographer snapping jumping trout.

"Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes," Roland Barthes wrote by way of describing the effect of the camera's surveillance on personal behavior. Highlighting the documentary effect of her art in the second work on view at Marian Goodman, Rineke Dijkstra presents one of the best, most revealing, empathetic videos seen in New York since Gillian Wearing's Drunk. Titled Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL, the video presents a split-screen projection of Dutch and English teens standing around, looking tough and dancing inside two separate kiddie discotheques.

Shot against a plain white screen by a fixed camera that restricts its movements to slow, gradual zooms, Buzzclub/Mysteryworld investigates the banal terrain of teen rave culture by shooting these teens singly, snatched away from the purportedly collective, ironically wordless experience of the nightclub. Driven along by an ear-thumping soundtrack of repetitive house music and lame DJ banter, teenage girls and boys appear and disappear, drink, smoke self-consciously and try on the studied looks of anomie and disaffection so obviously cribbed from movies and fashion magazines.

A fleshy-faced girl pulling on a Budweiser gets things started; a buxom adolescent in tight shorts and a halter follows, smacking gum and swaying her ass with equal parts practice and inexperience; a groping couple suck face with embarrassingly desperate awkwardness; a dopey blonde wearing a white cut-out dress and an incongruous Catholic cross shakes it with abandon and weirdly slutty class; a pair of greasy-haired twin brothers in identical track suits bob their heads in unison to an undanceable beat. Witness the Western teenager in his or her preferred natural habitat: a beer-addled, E-enhanced, stupendously bored, but nonetheless sympathetic sight. He or she might be our friend, Dijkstra tells us, our sister or brother, our son or daughter, even ourselves if only for a lost, quickly forgotten decade or two.

Provoking that familiar sensation of envy and protectiveness one feels when seeing a crowd of adolescents painting the town red, Buzzclub/Mysteryworld gets down the essential hopped-up teenager, oversexed for his or her age yet unconvinced of sexiness altogether, sporting a brave mask of confidence yet betraying, openly and to anyone, bucketloads of anxiety. In a word, Dijkstra's video and photographs work because they register the real with zero sensationalism and no melodrama. Unguarded versions of these molting creatures, they tweak a nerve hardwired straight back to experience. Its message is clear and familiar: been there, done that.

"Rineke Dijkstra," through Oct. 28 at Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W. 57th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.), 977-7160.