This story appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue. Get yours now.
written by CLAIRE KORON ELAT
When artist Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) and her assistant were visiting Liverpool in 1994 to shoot photographs at schools, their cab driver brought them to The Buzz Club. The “troubled Liverpool nightclub” was a haunt for teens tirelessly dancing, consuming drugs, and performing other rites of passage. “The girls were all dressed up, but the boys looked very plain,” Dijkstra remembers. It was impossible to take photos in the club space, so the staff allowed her to build her own studio in one of the back rooms.
“I could have built a studio somewhere else, and asked people to come the day after, but it’s so important that they are in the right, real atmosphere, that they are in the moment of going out,” Dijkstra says. Her back room turned into an energetically transitional in-between space that oscillated between public and private. This is how The Buzz Club series started—portraits of different guests who were placed before a plain white backdrop.
Today, Dijkstra’s monumental body of work is known for its focus on adolescent subjects on the path of self-discovery. Her portraits span soldiers, school children, asylum seekers, athletes, and beachgoers. Through still and moving images, Dijkstra makes people unfamiliar, unsettled even, in their mundane settings—a photographic dictum reminiscent of Diane Arbus’ approach of capturing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Despite trying to photograph people in their most authentic state, which for her is about “finding the personal and individual, and complexity in someone,” Dijkstra felt like she wasn’t able to capture the night’s holistic atmosphere: “You miss the dancing. You miss the music. Or the DJ announcing a birthday. I couldn’t capture that in a single image.” Confronted with the question of whether a photograph is able to freeze a moment in reality, Dijkstra decided to change mediums and started to work with video.
Her clinically shot videos functioned as a tool to bring a more narrative composition to her image-making, as she was able to document the night from start to finish. The video starts at 10 p.m. with the DJ welcoming everyone at the club and announcing birthdays. Then it starts to build up. People become more immersed in the atmosphere of the night.
Dijkstra’s aim to capture the entire architecture of a night out was part of a larger ambition to bring as much authenticity to her work as possible. When asked what makes a photograph inauthentic, she says, “I think what you mostly see on social media is inauthentic. Working with a four-by-five-inch camera is such a different experience than photographing with an iPhone.” In 1994, it was a project for Dijkstra to photograph nightlife, but today everyone at the club has a camera in their pockets. As a result of this overexposure, there is little to no myth around clubs like there was back in the ’90s.
“Time really is changing,” she says, “and there aren’t so many people anymore who work with the camera I use, which is in a way nostalgic. But this camera also brings a kind of concentration. You can’t take a lot of pictures right after each other.” As the culture shifts towards the prosumer who relentlessly and rapidly produces and consumes images, leaving no space for the imaginary, there’s a strong energy to the way producer, subject, and audience are clearly separated in her images. As she puts it: “If you think about a really good photograph, it is one that builds up myths.”
All artwork courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Copyright © Rineke Dijkstra